Tidewater News and Opinion Forum
A place for civil discussion of the events of the day for Tidewater residents without the limitations imposed by media forums.
Easy Peasy Hypocrite test : Anyone claiming these facts don’t deserve as much or far more Congressional scrutiny as Hunter Biden’s laptop is a hypocrite.
Pop Quiz : Who said “I saved his ass.”
(a) Trump speaking of MBS after he blocked efforts to sanction him for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.
(b) MBS speaking of Trump after investing BILLIONS in the Trump family’s mismanaged investments.
(c) All of the above.
Read the piece to find the answer.
And, lest we forget, there is this :
As part of his campaign to win the MAGA-Republican nomination for President in 2024 Florida Governor Ron DeSantis made a big show of rejecting the College Board’s AP African-American History Course for high school Seniors. What is the word for such blatant race-baiting grandstanding? Deplorable maybe?
Well, the College Board is as mad as Hell and isn’t going to take it anymore. They have issued this open letter in response where they say . . .
“We deeply regret not immediately denouncing the Florida Department of Education’s slander, magnified by the DeSantis administration’s subsequent comments, that African American Studies “lacks educational value.” “
Birtherism worked for Trump. Looks like DeSantis wants to play the same ugly and divisive game.
One of the earliest and ugliest images of the rise of fascism in Germany was the drooling mobs glorying in the burning of books on May 10, 1933.
https://www.visitberlin.de/en/book-burning-memorial-bebelplatz
Not to be outdone, MAGA darling Ron DeSantis has passed a law in Florida that will keep unsuitable books out of school libraries. So far more than ONE MILLION books have been blocked as unsuitable. This is just one of them because it describes the discrimination that Roberto Clemente encountered and fought against. We can’t have our kids learning about that!
What a classy bunch!
United States Senator Steven Daines (R-MT) had his Twitter account suspended when he chose this image for his banner. You can post such pictures, but Twitter forbids use of “sensitive material” in banners. “Sensitive material” includes gore which includes the killing of animals. This magnificent pronghorn antelope has blood dripping from its dead mouth and blood splatter on its legs. Where some people – like GOP politician Ryan Zinke – see a happy, wholesome family picture others see grinning cowards glorying in the blood and suffering of an innocent animal (see the Twitter comments). Twitter sees a violation of its policies.
Zinke congratulates the apparent shooter with a “Great shot, Cindy.” I dunno. Do you have to see a beautiful living creature snuffed out of existence to validate your shooting skills? Personally, I have no problem with hunters and anglers putting meat on the table – I eat meat myself – but I have never had any respect for “trophy” hunters who kill for sport and sport alone – People like this . . .
MAGA-Republicans have their hair on fire over the Chinese balloon flying over the United States. It shows, they say, how weak President Biden is and how little respect the Chinese have for him. Well, an inconvenient truth has now come to light. There were not one, not two, but three such balloon incursions during the Trump administration. Not only were they not destroyed, their existence was kept from the American people.
Personally, I think such balloons are not a big deal and I do not fault Trump for keeping mum about them for diplomatic or other reasons. But what does stand out is the mammoth hypocrisy and double standard evidenced in these MAGA-Republican leaders.
(33) JORDAN PETERSON: “Chat GPT and AI WILL TAKE OVER” – YouTube
I first became aware of Chat GPT a couple of weeks ago in a conversation with my son who is a Harvard graduate with a PhD in History from Columbia University. He has made his living as a wordsmith with speech writing gigs in Congress and later at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Currently he prepares position papers and speeches for clients such as the Gates Foundation. He makes a very good living doing this work.
With that as background, he tried out Chat GPT and – like Jordan Peterson – was blown away by what it can do. Literally astonished. He believes it is a world changing technology that will do to the intellectual and professional work force what automation has been doing to production workers. Doctors, lawyers, scientists, writers, designers, artists, movie makers, you name it – anybody who works with their mind will see the value of their work evaporate when AI can do it as well or better in seconds.
With this game-changing technology coming down the pike, we really need to be thinking of a new economic paradigm. The current work for money system is not going to cut it for much longer. Some form of Universal Basic Income is where we need to go. We will need some very smart people in government to see us through this transition without kicking over the apple cart.
Yep, it is none other than Gym Jordan who tweeted the following complete nonsense on Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“First, they came for your guns. Then your gas stoves. Then your gas cars. What next?”
This phrasing is channeling the timeless lament by Martin Niemöller :
“First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
As a reminder, this clueless, sex-crime-ignoring jackass is now one of the most powerful members of the Republican Party.
The body cam video of the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi has now been released. It makes very, very clear how far out of line “conservative” shitheads such as Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, Charlie Kirk, Sean Hannity, and several members of Congress were with their smears, jokes, and speculation. If memory serves, some of the “conservatives” on this forum joined in the merry-making and giggling.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/01/paul-pelosi-attack-footage
A few weeks back the MAGA-Republicans around here could hardly contain their glee when it was reported – on right wing media – that Hunter Biden had been paying $49,910 a month to his father for rent on the family home. To these giant MAGA minds it was obvious that this was money being funneled from China – or was it Ukraine – to pay off the “Big Guy.” More proof of the “Biden Crime family” conspiracy theory they love so much. Tucker Carlson spent a whole show telling his marks that President Biden had massively cheated on his tax returns by not showing all this rent and that mysteriously the tax returns had disappeared. (They hadn’t.)
And, my oh my did they complain that MSM did not run with the story. More cover-up and conspiracy was the explanation.
Well, guess what? Hunter Biden did not fill out the rent application in question. An assistant did. And the rent referred to on the “smoking gun” application form was the rent Hunter was paying for a posh office in a DC office building -a fact confirmed by his DC landlord.
It is worth noting that the New York Post’s Miranda Devine was the main spreader of the false interpretation of the form. She tried to walk it back a few days later but the millions who gobbled up her wrong story ignored her correction. If “Miranda Devine” sounds familiar it is because she is the Murdoch reporter whose “analysis” “proves” that Hunter Biden could not have written his email to a colleague about Ukraine without access to classified materials because – well – just because.
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