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jetray said:
Irrespective of whether Trump is guilty or not , conducting a trial & giving a verdict right when the elections are coming up is nothing short of political vendetta. Irony is that that for all the things that Trump is and the statements he said about putting Hilary to trial he never carried it out. But on the other hand Dems have never spared an opportunity to go after Trump.

The debate between Trump vs Biden if it takes place, it will be a show worth watching. Hope the media does not pull a fast one on this.


Another person who survived the vicious US sledging campaign , Modi will be keenly awaiting the US election result.
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They don't like convicting ex-Presidents and try to avoid it because it brings the position of office into disrepute, e.g. Nixon. But Nixon had the good f'cking sense to just f'ck off. Both are guilty though.
 
Innominate said:
You're watching this from afar therefore ignorant on how this trial itself was allowed to happen.

All jury members were anti Trump.

Judge was SELECTED and not picked by machine. Also the judge is a donor to Biden and Judges daughter makes money for Biden campaign.

District Attorney ran on (D.A's get elected) getting Trump and was allowed to make misdemeanors into felonies the only problem is nobody knows what the crime actually is.

They allowed a convicted attorney who is a liar and stole from Trump, who actually admitted to paying a pornstar to make the accusations go away, which isn't a crime, without Trump's knowledge.

It goes on and on which is why the conviction is going to be overturned quickly and the democrat party knows it but that wasn't the point of the trial. Point of trial was to keep Trump from campaigning and to label him a felon/criminal even when conviction is overturned. Nobody has ever been prosecuted for a hush payment where both parties agreed and person that paid it (Trump attorney) admitting it was his call and it's not even close to felony.


People like you are in for a huge disappointment you just made this man more powerful than he could ever imagine. I'm surprised he didn't crack a smile at his press conference as he thinks to himself I just got elected president.

This was a current president/administration trying to prevent his political opponent from running for president or better said, election interference as Biden officials actually prepared anti Trump witness.


Democrat party has openly corrupted the judicial system and has handed Trump this style system that he is going to use on his political enemies... congratulations. This is going to be the biggest "what goes around comes around" retaliation by a US president and unfortunately the people in this country are going to be ok with it or tolerate it.
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Nothing of the sort will happen. You know why , sweetie ? Coz MAGA is past it's sell by date.
BMD said:
They don't like convicting ex-Presidents and try to avoid it because it brings the position of office into disrepute, e.g. Nixon. But Nixon had the good f'cking sense to just f'ck off. Both are guilty though.
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Please shut up. It's a different matter the moderation here is inclined towards you otherwise in any other forum you'd be a bloody idiot.
 
@_Anonymous_
Lulz. I was wondering if my babe would take my bait and respond and she did!!! :love::love:

How you been darling has lurking in here and fighting the urge to respond been driving you daffy? It doesn't have to be you can just let go of this tantrum behavior towards the Mods it wasn't them that got you to lose your cool it was me, and a find job I did, eh? Lol.

Just come back Raj misses you soooo much that he can't stop thinking about you.
 
A russian bot was identified and people had fun with it.
https://twitter.com/x/status/1803003015403606298

https://twitter.com/x/status/1802974326943015087

https://twitter.com/x/status/1802978847819805168

But for one that has been found out, how many haven't?

Here's a quick guide to tell if someone is a bot on twitter:
- Is it pro-russia?
- Is it pro-Trump?
- It is pro-crypto "currencies"?
- Does it have a blue checkmark?
- Does Elon Musk retweet it?

If you can answer "yes" to at least two of these questions, then it is a bot.
 
  • Haha
Reactions: BMD
www.theguardian.com

Tech broligarchs are lining up to court Trump. And Vance is one more link in the chain

Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, a longtime backer of the new vice-president pick, are among those pledging support
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
Less than a month after Donald Trump was elected president in November 2016, he invited the cream of Silicon Valley’s tech elite to a meeting at his transition team’s headquarters at Trump Tower.

It was an awkward affair. Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, Google’s Larry Page and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos had facial expressions that ranged from a semi-rictus grin to full tech-mogul-in-a-hostage-situation. But then, in a sense they were. There was a new sheriff in town – and none of them had seen him coming.


But one person was in his element. Seated next to Trump, uncomplicatedly beaming, was a South African-raised tech entrepreneur whose early investment in Facebook had made him billions.

This was Peter Thiel. And if this past week marked an inflection point, and there are many reasons to believe it did, the seeds of it were planted in the summer of 2016. This was when Trump was the outside candidate. The man no respectable west coast tech entrepreneur or east coast business elite wanted to touch.

Last week marked a decisive end to that era. A week in which Donald Trump not only appointed a tech bro to be his second in command, choosing Senator JD Vance to be his VP, but in which he received the benediction of the tech bro-in-chief, Elon Musk.

Musk has said he will donate $45m a month to Trump’s campaign, though his ongoing endorsement on X, the platform he bought and owns, is worth countless millions more.

But it’s some lesser-known figures in Silicon Valley who last week boarded the Trump bandwagon who are perhaps even more telling. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who own one of the most storied and influential venture capital (VC) firms in Silicon Valley, have declared they’re all in for Trump alongside a host of lesser-known but important names who have either followed suit or who beat them to the punch, including the Winklevoss twins and investors and podcast hosts Chamath Palihapitiya and David Sacks.

Back in 2016, Peter Thiel was the voice in the wilderness. And in that meeting in Trump Tower, it was Thiel’s hand that Trump picked up and stroked. (And whose data mining firm, Palantir, picked up billions of dollars in contracts from Trump’s Department of Defense, and, most controversially, Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, where it profiled and surveilled migrants.)

The principle that underpins Silicon Valley investing is to bet early and bet big. It worked for Thiel with Facebook. It worked for Thiel with Trump. And last week another of his bets paid off, though few could ever have predicted how spectacularly.

Because JD Vance, the new potential VP, is Thiel’s creature. He is a man Thiel moulded in his own image through lavish investments in his business and political careers. Thiel gave Vance a job at his VC firm, Mithril Capital, backed him to start his own venture fund, Narya Capital, then later invested $15m in his successful run for the senate. Max Chafkin, Thiel’s biographer, describes Vance as his “extension”.

The payoff from Thiel’s early gamble in Trump is a lesson that has not passed others by. As with their other obsession, crypto, the best time to have invested in Trump was 2016, and the second best time is today. We already have a word for what we’re watching now: it’s oligarchy. And we’ve already seen how this plays out. In Putin’s Russia, political and commercial interests are one and the same.

Thiel is betting – again – on the same phenomenon in America. Betting that he will be first among a new breed of tech bro oligarchs – a new super-class of broligarchs.

In Trump’s America, there will be hard choices for everyone, including the billionaires. Though it may be less hard for them. Vance has said he wants to deregulate crypto and unshackle AI. He’s said he’d dismantle Biden’s attempts to place safeguards around AI development.
And while he has it in for the legacy monopolies of Google and Facebook – the platforms that his ideological bedfellows in the “new right” see as part of the “censorship industrial complex” suffocating rightwing speech – Silicon Valley is betting on a gloves-off, regulation-free, pro-business goldrush.

Another Peter Thiel acolyte was on stage at the Republican National Convention last week, electrifying the crowd: Hulk Hogan. Hogan is less well known as one of Thiel’s longterm bets, though in some ways he’s even more instructive than Vance. In 2007, the online magazine Gawker outed Thiel and ran a series of unflattering articles about him. It took him years, but he ultimately got his revenge, covertly funding Hulk Hogan to the tune of $10m to sue the publication for invasion of privacy and forcing it into bankruptcy.

On stage at the RNC, the wrestler, a permatanned orange, ripped off his shirt for the man who increasingly looks like he’ll be America’s next president. Or, if JD Vance, is correct, the man who will prove to be the Caesar he says America needs. A man who he has already urged to fire the nation’s civil servants to “replace them with our people”, to defy the courts and rule his own way. Or, to put this in simple terms: to foment a coup.

Thiel knows what every investor knows. That a crisis is an opportunity. And that if Trump succeeds in tearing up the federal administration, there is not only billions to be made in the ensuing market turmoil but that a new breed of oligarchs, close to Caesar’s throne, will be the first to share the spoils.

And chief among them will be Thiel. It’s not a stretch to see how Palantir, his data-mining company – that under the Conservatives got its teeth into the NHS – will profile and surveil and target Caesar’s enemies. And Thiel’s track record in winning, in successfully betting on the longest of odds, on biding his time, is maybe the most chilling of all the factors in a fortnight that has started to feel like the start of a run on the bank.

Biden’s debate disaster, Trump’s victorious assassination survival, and now Silicon Valley’s ascension to the presidential ticket. The broligarchs have made their move – and the rest of us need to understand exactly what that means.

This article was amended on 21 July 2024. An earlier version described Peter Thiel as “South African-born”; in fact he was born in Germany and grew up in South Africa and the US.
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snyder.substack.com

Veep Stakes

Will Vance be Sacrificed?
snyder.substack.com snyder.substack.com
In a normal presidential campaign, such as the one Vice-President Kamala Harris is running, “veepstakes” is a harmless play on the word “sweepstakes,” invoking a friendly competition to become a vice-presidential nominee. One can enjoy thinking about matches between the presidential and vice-presidential candidates and wonder how it will all turn out.

But “stakes” can be harder, or sharper. One can be burned at a stake, sacrificed on a stake, or killed by a stake through the heart. For Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, this election has morbid overtones.

Trump’s candidacy is a mortality play. He wants to die in the White House. Whatever else he might say, or whatever else his followers might believe, this is the essential reality. Old-guy dictatorship involves funeral planning. When Trump says that he admires a Putin or a Xi, what he means is “that man will die in office and not in jail.”

Since Trump is thinking about death, Vance must as well. In considering a place on the ticket, Vance was reasoning from different premises than (for example) Andy Beshear. If Kamala Harris asks Beshear to join her on the ticket, he can imagine running for president in 2032. Vance, by contrast, knows that Trump, so long as he lives, will never voluntarily get out of the way.

A Vance who wishes to be president needs Trump to win in November, stay alive long enough to take office in January, and then perish. One does not have to be an actuary to understand why Vance might think that this is a good bet.

Vance was the choice of the tech broligarchs – Elon Musk, David Sacks, Peter Thiel. Vance was also the preferred option of the Kremlin, whose propaganda line Musk and Sacks tend to follow. Had Trump chosen anyone but Vance, he could have been sure of that person’s loyalty to him. But Vance is a tech brotegé, not a Trump client.

In the heady atmosphere of Milwaukee, the selection of Vance could seem like a win for everyone. Trump gets the money he needs from the broligarchs (e.g. a promise of $45 million a month from Musk), who happily contemplate installing their guy as his successor. Trump believed that he was running against Joe Biden and that he was going to win easily. Vance could make his private calculations about Trump’s longevity, and go along with the show. Vance was endorsed by the Russian foreign ministry for his pro-surrender foreign policy.

A week later, with Kamala Harris as the presumptive Democratic nominee, everything looks different. The Harris candidacy is bad for Putin and the broligarchs, but not fatal. Putin wants Trump to win, because that is his only hope of winning in Ukraine. But should Trump lose the election, Putin will figure out some other way of saving himself. Russian propagandists are already turning against Vance. The broligarchs would like to run the American government. Should they fail, though, nothing bad will happen to them. Now Musk denies promising the monthly $45 million to Trump’s campaign.

The billionaires are entirely safe. Trump and Vance are the ones who are exposed. Now that Trump recognizes that the election will be competitive, Vance’s weaknesses matter to him.

Vance’s skillset is limited. He was more articulate when he opposed Trump than in his present support. Vance saying that Trump is an “idiot” who could be “America’s Hitler” is hard to forget. On the campaign trail, Vance channels broligarch grievance and mocks everyone else. This is backroom back-slapping delight when only the billionaires’ voices matter, as in Milwaukee.

But in an election, other voices count.

Vance’s policy approach is not very resonant. He specializes in weak-man politics. His claim is that government is always impotent. This does not work together with Trump’s strong-man fantasy. Trump’s followers want to believe that the system can be trashed and they can still get what they want from it -- a bit of magical thinking that Trump’s charisma enables.

Vance can’t pull that off. When he explains that government is pointless, it is a bit too clear that what he means is that broligarchs should run wild at home while dictators should push Americans around abroad. That is not actually what voters want to hear, including Republican voters. Sacks found that out when he read aloud Putin’s talking points from the stage in Milwaukee.

Trump must now run an uphill campaign, pulling Vance along behind him.

Vance is from Ohio. Having a Buckeye on the ticket will not help Trump in neighboring Michigan or Pennsylvania, states he must win. And if Ohio is in play, the Trump campaign has deep problems. When Vance held a rally in his hometown, a local ally threatened “civil war” after a lost election. This does not express confidence.

Vance could even hurt in Ohio itself.

Reproductive rights were always going to be central to this campaign; Kamala Harris is certain to raise it more clearly than Biden would have. Vance is infamous for his (vulgar and public) support for a national abortion ban. Last November, Ohio voters codified reproduction rights in the state constitution by referendum – by a vote of 57% in favor. This was a personal defeat for Vance, who characterized the pro-choice Ohio majority as “sociopaths” who “murder their own children.”

Trump has been played by unreliable people, which could be uncomfortable for Vance. And Vance must understand that the Harris candidacy alters his own situation.

Instead of coasting to victory with Trump and waiting for him to die, Vance now must contemplate what it would mean to lose alongside Trump in November -- in an election angry Republicans have been trained to believe would be a landslide. Trump cannot blame the broligarchs or Putin, since he cannot admit that he needed the money and support of others. That leaves Vance as the scapegoat.

Vance must now imagine a world, about three months from now, in which Trump instructs his followers that Vance is to blame. Trump has driven Republicans out of the party by stochastic violence. He was ready to sacrifice the life of his last vice-president. If Vance leaves now, he will feel the heat for a moment, but can go back to his prior life. The longer Vance waits to leave the Trump ticket, the greater the risk of a scenario involving a stake.

The necropolitics is no one’s fault but that of the people concerned. Republicans did not have to nominate an aged coup-plotting felon. The broligarchs did not have to install their candidate to succeed a deceased Trump. And Vance did not have to join Trump’s ticket.

On the Democratic side, the picture is much brighter. Kamala Harris seeks her vice-presidential nominee, following the familiar rules of the gentle version of veepstakes. It is fun to follow. Maybe Kelly? Shapiro? Or Buttigieg? Or Whitmer? Who knows? It is refreshing to imagine two candidates wishing each other well, having complementary policies, working towards a better future, towards life.
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www.yahoo.com

FBI Examining Bullet Fragments Found at Trump Rally Site

WASHINGTON — The FBI is examining numerous metal fragments found near the stage at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, to determine whether a would-be assassin’s bullet — or potential debris — grazed former President Donald Trump’s head, bloodying his right ear, according to the FBI and a...
www.yahoo.com www.yahoo.com
 
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