“Affordability “doesn’t mean anything to anybody,” said President Donald Trump during a Tuesday Cabinet meeting at the White House, saying it’s a “fake narrative” and “con job” that Democrats manufactured to hoodwink the public.
“They just say the word,” Trump added. “It doesn’t mean anything to anybody. They just say it—affordability. I inherited the worst inflation in history. There was no affordability. Nobody could afford anything.”
In classic Trump fashion, this is an about-face. Just a few days prior, he declared on Truth Social, “I AM THE AFFORDABILITY PRESIDENT” when touting falling drug prices.”
“The word affordability is a Democrat scam,” he said. “They say it, and then they go on to the next subject. And everyone thinks, ‘Oh, they had lower prices.'”
The overwhelming share of shootings in the US are from arguments. They aren’t from people committing a crime, or people murdering for revenge, they are from heated arguments, and in the moment of escalation, someone shoots someone else.
Wealthy areas have much less shootings, but even between neighborhoods with similar socio-demographics, there are some with high shootings and some with low shootings.
Experiments that involve cleaning up vacant lots in neighborhoods, and teaching men how to respond to provocation, have found drastic reductions in violence.
Initially, and for some time, the Biden administration didn’t know what to do with the flood of people coming across the border. There was not clear leadership on the issue, and some hoped it would die down on its own. Then the administration wanted Congress to pass something to help them solve the issue without using executive force on its own. Trump convinced Republican Congressmen to not vote for that bill even though it moved policy closer to what they agreed with. Then, Biden used executive authority and successfully stopped the flow. Politically, this was too late for him to get credit.
Elon Musk says his daughter was killed by the woke mind virus because she is a male to female trans person. She wrote on social media, disputing her metaphorical death.
Sulla lost an election when running based on his successes as a junior officer. Next election, he ran by telling the voters what they wanted to hear and bribing people, and won.
The MAGA right is really good at bullshiting. They don’t express the same principles or beliefs from topic to topic. They claim that Democrats did it first when what a Democrat did was different or not as bad, and when two wrongs don’t make a right. When confronted on a specific and important event, they claim ignorance.
Mainstream media is often biased to the right because they are so concerned about not being considered biased to the left that they overcorrect, and because the right is more likely to repeatedly lie and the mainstream isn’t good at holding their feet to the fire; while they will come hard at a liberal for a softer or/and less misleading actions.
The US military is weakening compared to its peers and is too heavily relying on aging legacy systems. US military spending is incredibly low compared to the Cold War. If the US doesn’t remain the strongest country, then the US, for all its flaws, will look like an angel compared to the authoritarian countries who will replace the US.
Nostalgia is manufactured as easily as plastic trinkets, and it distracts adults who should know better. The 1950s, mythologized by the New Right in its push for a more traditional social and economic order, were not an idyll.
Instead it was an era of shorter life expectancy, of higher poverty by today’s standards, of legal and de facto discrimination, of limited economic opportunity for women and minorities, of gay Americans often being persecuted, and of far fewer consumer goods, technologies, and comforts. Implying that it was a golden age overlooks economic facts and the individuals whose rights and opportunities were sharply constrained.
The left’s narrative—that America remains fundamentally unjust and economically stacked against working families—is equally disconnected from empirical reality. As Michael Strain and Clifford Asness recently detailed in The Free Press, we live in the wealthiest mass-affluent society in human history. Typical workers’ real wages are dramatically higher than they were two generations ago. Post-tax incomes for the bottom fifth of the scale have more than doubled since 1990. Wealth for the poorest quarter of U.S. households has tripled. Consumption, the best measure of a lived-in well-being, is hitting record highs.
These data do not deny that some people struggle, but they show that the dominant narrative of national economic decline is false.”
“the goal of disrupting and deterring drug smuggling would not justify a policy of summarily executing criminal suspects without statutory authorization or any semblance of due process. That is why Trump is trying to justify his bloodthirsty anti-drug strategy by calling his targets “combatants” in a “non-international armed conflict”—a term he has stretched beyond recognition.
Congress has not recognized that purported “armed conflict,” and it is a counterintuitive label for the unilateral violence exemplified by the September 2 attack. The boat that Bradley destroyed, which reportedly “turned around before the attack started because the people onboard had apparently spotted a military aircraft stalking it,” was not engaged in any sort of attack on American targets and offered no resistance. The same was true of the vessels destroyed in subsequent attacks on suspected drug boats
…
The violence in such attacks is so one-sided that the government’s lawyers claim blowing up drug boats does not constitute “hostilities” under the War Powers Resolution because U.S. personnel face no plausible risk of casualties. So we are talking about an “armed conflict” that does not involve “hostilities” yet somehow does involve enemy “combatants.”
Unless you accept that baffling premise, the attempt to justify Bradley’s second strike under the law of war is incomprehensible. “Two U.S. officials have said the military intercepted radio communications from the survivors to suspected cartel members, raising the possibility that any drugs on the boat that had not burned up in the first blast could have been retrieved,” The New York Times reports. “The military, they said, interpreted the purported distress call as meaning the survivors were still ‘in the fight’ and so were not shipwrecked.”
In reality, of course, those men were not “in the fight” to begin with, because there was no “fight.” A unilateral act of aggression by U.S. forces hardly amounts to a battle, and it is hard to see how a radio call for help qualifies as the sort of “hostile act” that the Defense Department’s manual says excludes someone from “shipwrecked” status. To illustrate that exception, the manual notes that “shipwrecked persons do not include combatant personnel engaged in amphibious, underwater, or airborne attacks who are proceeding ashore.””