Greg Spradlin @spradlig@qoto.org

@spradlig @JonChevreau

“A spox for Butler Mem Hosp…told the Daily Beast Mon, 'We’re deferring any comment to the Trump team.' The Trump campaign declined to respond to questions about Trump’s condition & treatment.

“…so far, the Trump camp has not disclosed what kinds of tests the former president underwent, how he was treated & for what types of injuries….”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/mystery-over-donald-trumps-medical-condition-and-treatment-after-assassination-attempt

Laurence O’Donnell explaining that presidential campaigns are four-year projects, minimum 3 years. So Biden would have to announce in his 1st year of presidency that he wasn’t going to run again, and accomplish absolutely nothing, so that the Democratic Party would be able to pick another candidate. Biden would have gained zero votes from Sen. Manchin, for instance, would have not been able to pass any major legislation.

If you're here, you know this. But make sure everyone else knows:

Twitter is a Trump campaign website – and it could break your brain

Elon Musk’s $44 billion donation to Trump will make the site less than unusable by October.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/108300563

Venture capitalists come out for the fascist. https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/16/andreessen-horowitz-co-founders-explain-why-theyre-supporting-trump/

Ms. Magazine doing the hard work, while #MSM fall over themselves to grovel at trump’s feet.

Pro-tip to MSM: getting shot does not suddenly make a person “good” or “presidential”. They’re still the lying, racist, misogynistic, corrupt, conniving, narcissistic, xenophobic, psychopathic rapist they were before. Just now with a scar.

The 22 Scariest Lines We Found in Project 2025’s 900-Page ‘Mandate for Leadership’
https://msmagazine.com/2024/07/16/the-22-scariest-lines-we-found-in-project-2025s-900-page-mandate-for-leadership/

#Project2025 #MsMagazine #USPolitics #JournalismFail

Joe at the NAACP: "Folks I know what a Black job is. It's vice-president of the United States."

This.

Via Colin Robinson:

I’m begging yall to care like this when it’s a third grade classroom instead of an ear.

10 marches from John Phillips Sousa have been transformed into music xml using optical music recognition. https://archive.org/details/PublicJukebox?tab=collection&query=subject%3AOMR+AND+subject%3ASousa&sort=title In addition to the full score as .wav and .midi files, we have mixes for different sections ("low brass" "woodwinds"), as well as the individual instruments.

I have plenty to say right now, but…

Let’s face it, anything too analytic I have to say about anything but the assassination attempt will get swamped. So here are a few thoughts on that, starting with what we appear to know Sunday morning:

Yep, sure was a registered Republican. That’s solidly confirmed.
White, male, apparently cis (certainly gender-confirming), thank fuck for that
HOLY SHIT DEMOLITION RANCH T-SHIRT HOLY SHIRTBALLS WTF (YouTube gun enthusiast channel, look it up)
There’s an image of an Instagram profile going around THAT COULD BE BULLSHIT, WE DON’T KNOW RIGHT NOW. If it is real, it paints a motive of a very Christian person who was very aware of Epstein’s crimes and could well have been set off by the Trump-Epstein connections, of which there are a lot. This one makes a lot of sense to me, but WE DON’T KNOW IF THAT SCREENSHOT IS REAL YET. But we will in a day or two. Maybe even later today. But at time of writing, we don’t.
Various agents – directly Trumpian, Russian, Iranian probably, Mainland Chinese probably – are absolutely flooding the zone with shit, as Bannon likes to say, and as they always are to maximise confusion and anger. Remember that.

A few thoughts, all of which are blunt:

PANICKY BASTARDS, please remember that this does NOT give Trump the election, like some of you are going off about. Nazi dickholes killing Martin Luther King, Jr. and RFK didn’t cost Nixon the ’68 election, now did it? Yeah, sucks to be on the “like Nixon” side of this comparison but it’s still worth remembering.
RETURN-TO-NORMALCY NITWITS: There were a lot of assassination attempts on Hitler, too, a few of which came really close to success and were very obvious. This neither made him a better person nor calmed down either him OR his party. He’s still the same monstrously evil fuck he was yesterday and no plans have actually been changed.
CONSPIRACY CRANKS: For fuck’s sake, this was not a kayfabe. Look, I understand the impulse, I do. I really do. But the man is a coward. He just is. There’s no way in hell he’d risk live fire in the direction of himself, or even near it. It is not a “shock” that an amateur, under- or self-trained sniper missed, it’s frankly more of a surprise that he got as close as he did. Speaking as someone who has been a member of a gun club and was considered a pretty good shot, it’s not as easy to hit those as television and movies make you think.

Over the next day or two, more of this will become better confirmed and more clarified. Until then, keep your shit together as we all try to figure out what and how. And most of all, remember:

None of this makes Trump a better person or more fit for the office.

None of it. Remind people of that. He’s still the Day One Dictator, the man promising – explicitly! – mass deportations and de facto military occupations of blue states that will target 20 million people or more. He’s still the man promising to ramp up climate change as far as he can for his oil company friends, survivability be damned. He’s still the man running on a platform to wipe out trans people and he’s still the man who absolutely will let the fash end abortion nationally and go after birth control.

None of that has changed.

Don’t let people forget, because they will try.

Particularly not your Trump friends and family, who we all must still try to rope back into reality, or if we can’t manage that, at least … reel in a bit. Dampen their enthusiasm. Get them not to send that money, or encourage their friends to do the same.

Game’s still on. Take a day if you need to, but then get back out there.

113 days remain.

[link] #politics #USPol #fascism #politics #uspolitics

Build it and people will ride: “The Amtrak Borealis, a new rail line connecting Chicago and Minneapolis-St. Paul, has only been operating for about a month, but already thousands of passengers have taken the trip. That ridership has exceeded Amtrak’s expectations—and hints at the growing desire among Americans to travel by train.”

#Transportation #Mobility #Transit #Trains #Railways #ShortHaulTravel #UrbanPlanning #RegionalPlanning #TrainTravel #Amtrak #AmtrakBorealis

https://www.fastcompany.com/91153405/even-amtrak-was-surprised-by-the-instant-popularity-of-its-new-chicago-twin-cities-route

A large-scale psychological warfare operation.

A psychological op, shortened to op by intelligence types.

There is a non-stop multi channel attack to confuse or *exhaust* your critical thinking.

This disinformation psychological op will continue to increase for the next 4 months to influence the #2024election with maximum levels of bullshit and lies.

It's literally impossible to contend with all the stupid. These propagandists won't stop. It's about volume. Every second of every day, it will be some new conspiracy theory and/or lie/disinformation.

You've seen it before (Hillary Op).

Do not be a useful idiot.

Do not be part of the op.

#2024Election

Has Biden really lost ground in public opinion after his recent debate?

A Northeastern University report finds that Biden held on to 94% of the people who said they would support him pre debate, while Trump held on to 86% who said they would support him pre debate.

“The net result is not a movement away from #Biden. If anything, it seems that Biden is holding on to his people somewhat better than Trump.”

https://news.northeastern.edu/2024/07/09/biden-debate-performance-voter-preferences/

@emptywheel I’m not saying the NYT has become a tool of a Russian influence operation in the US, just that their actions are indistinguishable from a Russian influence operation.

This week, on this very fediverse, I’ve been told it’s “easy peasy” (exact words) to change presidential candidates at this stage. Another person told me "There's very little stopping us, logistically, from switching candidates for the ballots.” This person didn’t seem to know deadlines have already passed in several states for ballot access.
I’m not opposed to choosing the easiest path—VP Harris—if Biden chose to step down. I just want to know—what’s the Democrat’s plan for doing so?

Rebecca Solnit asks why the pundit class is so desperate to torpedo Biden in the same way it did to Hillary when she ran against Trump. People so "utterly convinced of their own ironclad rationality and objectivity" at the same time they have no clue about their emotional lives, biases, and motives….

#Biden #Trump #age #NewYorkTimes #MediaFail #Project2025
/4

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/06/biden-trump-race-rebecca-solnit

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/06/biden-trump-race-rebecca-solnit

Also, please educate yourself about the genuine, well-documented big media campaign against Biden. The owner of the New York Times, for example, is mad at Biden for not giving them an interview, and this is literally the reason they've been pushing the "Biden's age" issue, according to what a NYT journalist told Politico in April:

https://www.mediamatters.org/new-york-times/new-york-times-reporter-anonymously-linked-papers-publisher-its-coverage-bidens-age

The Washington Post and CNN are controlled by right-wing activist billionaires too, as are other major media. Biden's ABC "interview" on Friday was a joke, and ABC should be embarrassed by it.

So before you argue that Biden should drop out, please a) have some data that supports you, and b) be sure you understand the scope of the media manipulation that is happening *right now*, and try not to be subject to it. If you don't understand this is happening, you won't be well-informed about Biden.

Note that none of this is about which candidate we *like* more. It's about who can best win in November. (I actually preferred Harris in 2020.)

2/2

EVERY damn headline from WaPo and NYT is anti-Biden BS.

No need to tell me you've canceled subscriptions, I already know and good on ya.

But we need to counter this stuff.

We need to blast.

And we need to tell them DIRECTLY, as many of you have done, to stop this and go after FASCIST TRUMP and his cohorts.

I've repeatedly posted a Lawrence O’Donnell vid on why dropping NOW (key word) will lead to prob's. START AT 6:30, pre-6:30 is a waste: https://mastodon.social/@GottaLaff/112700224365400519

I will not debate this anymore

The compulsion to convince people Biden should drop falls on deaf ears bc the person making the ult decision is Biden, nobody else

I’m so over people trying to convince me, others why he should drop. WE don’t decide, HE does

If he drops, we vote for the Dem

If he doesn’t, we vote for him

End of story