Republicans know their polices are unpopular. They don’t want to serve the will of the people, they want to rule the people. They want minority rule over the majority. Their goals, not your needs or desires as the public are important to them. They see you are a problem, not as a valued voter. They don’t want to win your vote, they want to keep you from voting. We must defeat the republicans at all costs, yet our politicians are busy tearing down our best chance and arguing about who should run. There is no time for this shit. Get 110% behind the single candidate and beat the fuck out of praising them. Do it. The republicans do that. They don’t let tRump’s court cases or his rambling make no sense speeches stop them. They sing his praises which are all lies. And they win that way. They don’t care what is true. By my dogs that love gravy, the democrats love to sabotage themselves every chance they get. They are nervous nellies at every turn. Hugs. Scottie
Love – or at least a spike of users on the gay dating app Grindr – was reportedly in the Milwaukee air this week while the Republican National Convention was in town.
Over 1,000 users reported a Grindr outage in the Milwaukee area around 4 p.m. on Tuesday, according to Downdetector, a website that collects online service status information.
The Grindr app also allegedly experienced problems in the Cream City on Thursday— the fourth and final day of the RNC — as well as in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. However, Grindr’s official status updates show there hasn’t been an outage since May.
Nevertheless, a Grindr user who did not want to be identified told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he noticed an influx of anonymous users this week.
“On any given day, you’ll go on there and see a headless torso or blank profile,” the man told the outlet Thursday.
The source explained that a headless photo on someone’s Grindr profile usually means the person is looking for a fling and not a relationship. On a normal day, the Grindr user said he usually comes across around 10 users who don’t show their face, but claimed he stopped counting at 50 anonymous profiles when he checked the app Thursday.
Newsweek has contacted Grindr for comment but has not heard back.
The buzz surrounding allegedly increased Grindr traffic in Milwaukee rapidly spread on social media. Even ex-Congressman Geroge Santos, who said he met his husband on Grindr, got involved.
“Grindr executives are calling the RNC convention the Grindr Superbowl,” Santos said in a video posted Wednesday.
“Let me tell you something: just come out of the closet boys. Come on, it’s fun. You can be gay and conservative,” he added. “But look, Grindr is already outing you anyway based on the hits and guess who is in town? It’s all you conservatives.”
This wouldn’t be the first time Grindr saw increased traffic in cities hosting the RNC. In 2016, the Cleveland area saw a 66% increase in Grindr traffic while the convention was in town, according to a Vice article. Comparatively, Grindr hotspots like Times Square, Capitol Hill, Disneyland, and South Beach, Florida did not see any comparable traffic increase at that time.
This trend isn’t just exclusive to the Republican convention, either, according to the same Vice article. Grindr saw a reported 148% increase in traffic around Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Arena during the week of the 2016 DNC.
They want to claim the democrats are the violent ones, the democrats are the ones with gang thugs that threaten everyone. They claim the democrats are the ones using dangerous violence rhetoric. They ignore everything they say and do. Hugs. Scottie
“We are in a battle between GOOD and EVIL. The Democrats are the party of pedophiles, murdering the innocent unborn, violence, and bloody, meaningless, endless wars. They want to lock up their political opponents, and terrorize innocent Americans who would tell the truth about it. The Democrat party is flat out evil, and yesterday they tried to murder President Trump.” – Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, posting yesterday to X.
This morning, Speaker Mike Johnson called on politicians to “turn the rhetoric down."
“We’re all Americans, and we have to treat one another with dignity and respect.”
Don’t blame US for YOUR violence. Trump was shot at by one of your own, with a military assault rifle that was made readily available to him by your own party’s stance on the 2nd amendment. And stop calling us pedophiles you shrieking bag of pus.
i know this first hand when they tried removing my children, around 2006, because our lifestyle a danger to them. That is exactly what we the papers said. Not that they were harmed in and way, but two women in a relationship was a danger. We managed to fight those charges, but a few years earlier, a mother lost custody to her children, because her mother thought her lifestyle was a unhealthy.
It’s obvious a fucking projection of people like herself. THOSE HATER SPEECH 100% filled with harmful lies from MTG is enough to incite the country to turn into herself. She is the culprit of violence like assassination.
They will not accept defeat. Listen to them talk at the republican convention. The talk like they are a super majority. Hulk Hogan even gave a speech saying what are all you criminals, child abusers, … a bunch of insulting terms they use for democrats, what you going to do when tRump and maga troops come after you. Threats of violence. They used phrases like everyone wanted tRump, everyone agrees with republicans, the country wants a return to Christianity, they said things like our country, we need to take back our country. Hogan said all real Americans will be called tRumpiets. The rest of us that don’t want tRump are not Americans, we don’t love the USA. Every thing to make it seem that there is no way they can lose because there are so many of them and so little of everyone else. I hate it. The democrats need to project confidence instead we are eating our own candidate. How can we win if we can not stick together and show we know we are going to win. Hugs. Scottie
Mr. Trump’s allies have followed a two-pronged approach: restricting voting for partisan advantage ahead of Election Day and short-circuiting the process of ratifying the winner afterward, if Mr. Trump loses. The latter strategy involves an ambitious — and legally dubious — attempt to reimagine decades of settled law dictating how results are officially certified in the weeks before the transfer of power.
The legal campaign, which has come into focus as Republicans prepare to nominate Mr. Trump at their convention next week, has been quietly playing out in courts, statehouses and county boards for months, and is concentrated in critical battlegrounds.
The effort involves a sprawling network of groups and includes some people that worked to overturn the results in 2020 — a campaign that led to federal and state criminal charges against Mr. Trump and several of his associates.
In the movie “Recount” Tom Wilkerson, playing lead counsel James Baker for Team Bush, said, “This is a street fight, boys.” It’s high time Democrats recognize that’s the way Rethugs always play and fight back accordingly, unlike Team Gore.
I want thank PERSONNELENTE whose post I got the link from. Link below. I hate the infighting from Democrats tearing Biden apart. He is old, but he has great ideas. The time to get someone else was back a year or more ago. Plus all these drop Biden people can not agree on who should replace him. If they try to pass over Harris then it is an automatic win tRump. We have to remember who we are facing, it is tRump we must defeat, not Biden. Hugs. Scottie
Donald Trump announced Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as his vice presidential running mate on Monday. The following article is composed of direct quotes from Vance about Trump, given in interviews, op-eds, tweets, and text messages.
I don’t know who I’m gonna vote for. I’m definitely not gonna vote for Trump because I think that he’s projecting very complex problems onto simple villains.2 I quickly realized that Trump’s actual policy proposals, such as they are, range from immoral to absurd.3
Trump instead offers a political high, a promise to “Make America Great Again” without a single good idea regarding how.4 [His] promises are the needle in America’s collective vein. … Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.5 Whether he wins or not, people are going to wake up and realize these problems are still there.6
Without some recognition that some of these problems in our community are not the fault of other people, they’re not going to be solved by a Mexican border wall or better trade deals with China. Without some recognition along those lines, I don’t believe these problems are ever truly going to get better.7
And if you think, as I do, that Donald Trump doesn’t necessarily have a good message either, that’s maybe not the best approach to politics. It’s not how you win these folks over. And if you’re worried about them being racist now, when you push them away and push them to somebody like Trump, you’re only going to make the problem worse.8
But I’m not surprised by Trump’s rise, and I think the entire [Republican] Party has only itself to blame. We are, whether we like it or not, the party of lower-income, lower-education white people, and I have been saying for a long time that we need to offer those people SOMETHING (and hell, maybe even expand our appeal to working class black people in the process) or a demagogue would. We are now at that point. Trump is the fruit of the party’s collective neglect. … I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler. How’s that for discouraging?9
The other big problem I have with Trump is that he has dragged down our entire political conversation.10 [He] is changing the way people think about other groups of people in a very negative way.11 [T]here is definitely an element of [his] support that has its basis in racism or xenophobia.12
A lot of people think Trump is just the first to appeal to the racism and xenophobia that were already there, but I think he’s making the problem worse.13 There are people who are drawn to Trump because he says racially insensitive things.14 [He] still hasn’t apologized for suggesting that a disproportionate share of Mexican immigrants are rapists and criminals.15
People listen to what their political leaders are telling them, and my view is both that Trump is tapping into some racially ugly attitudes, but also that he is leading people to racially ugly attitudes. … [He] is exploiting something but he’s also leading the white working class to a very dark place.16His rallies may be cathartic, as he screams and yells at conjured enemies, but he offers no solutions. His entire candidacy is an exercise in pointing the finger at someone else. In pointing that finger so repeatedly and enthusiastically, Donald Trump has debased our entire political culture.17
I can’t stomach Trump. I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.18 [He] makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us.19
Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office.20
Thanks to politicians are poody heads for the link. Their link below. Destroying public education has been a goal of the right for a long time. They want to make it for profit and use it for public indoctrination in both right wing ideology and in the Christian religion. The one thing they don’t want to use school for is an educated public. The well off do not send their kids to public school. They want the public school to educate workers to follow orders and not to think for themselves. Hugs. Scottie
Ohio Senate President, Matt Huffman has been trying to hide behind the gerrymandered power of the Ohio GOP to avoid being deposed in court about the lobbyists he talked with privately as the Ohio Senate was getting ready to insert an especially lavish, last minute expansion of EdChoice vouchers into the state budget bill in June of 2023.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer‘s Laura Hancock explains: “A judge can’t force Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman to answer lawyers’ questions about which private school lobbyists he speaks to outside of legislative chambers, the Republican has argued before the Ohio Supreme Court.” Huffman doesn’t want to comply with a subpoena to testify in the case of the Vouchers Hurt Ohio, brought by 200 school districts to demonstrate that private school tuition vouchers violate the provisions of the Ohio Constitution. Hancock continues, referring to the step Huffman took to discourage school districts from joining the lawsuit: “Huffman’s battle has lasted over a year, and even included a request from Huffman during last year’s state budget season that every school district provide the legislature and Ohio Auditor Keith Faber the amount of money they’re spending on the litigation…. Huffman believes that a portion of the Ohio Constitution that privileges lawmakers’ speech and debate from questioning applies not just to speech and debate on the Senate floor but to all discussion on bills…”
And the gerrymandered legislature’s attempt to wield power isn’t limited to trying to avoid testifying in court about the voucher expansion. Marilou Johanek just penned another bombshell Ohio Capital Journal column about the debate last week as the legislature finished up work for the summer and autumn: “Nobody, but showboating extremists in the Ohio legislature, gives a damn about which school bathroom is used by a minuscule number of transgender students… Same goes for the nonsense cooked up in the Ohio Senate to wield an authoritarian hammer over the state’s highly regarded colleges and universities. It’s a kneejerk response to a long-running Fox News narrative about leftist indoctrination ruining higher ed. The MAGA Republican fever dream to own campus libs by censoring them lives in the Senate bill stalled in the Ohio House that nobody—except gerrymandered ideologues—wants or needs…. It doesn’t improve life for students or faculty and threatens to make it worse with tyrannical rule over great academic institutions.”
The best one can say is both of these bills have been passed by only one chamber and can’t be acted on again until the legislature reconvenes for a lame duck session right after the November election.
But Ohio’s GOP dictatorship pales compared what’s happening this month in Oklahoma—the state where, The Oklahoman‘s Murray Evans reports,“Oklahoma State Schools Superintendent Ryan Walters sent a letter to state school districts… ordering them to incorporate the Bible ‘as an instructional support into the curriculum’ for grades 5 through 12, citing its importance as a historical document. ‘Adherence to this mandate is compulsory,’ Walters’ letter read…. ‘Immediate and strict compliance is expected.’…. Walters announcement came two days after the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that a contract between the Statewide Virtual School Charter Board and St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which would have been the nation’s first religious-based charter school, violated both the state and U.S. Constitutions and state law.”
Evans provides evidence that Walter’s new order does not seem to represent the will of the voters. In 2016, they rejected “by more than 200,000 votes,” a state constitutional amendment to remove Section 5, Article 2 of the Oklahoma Constitution, “which states, ‘No public money or property shall ever be appropriated, applied, donated, or used, directly or indirectly, for the use, benefit, or support of any sect, church, denomination, or system of religion, or for the use, benefit, or support of any priest, preacher, minister, or other religious teacher or dignitary, or sectarian institution as such.’”
It is hard to understand why Oklahoma’s state school superintendent is prioritizing mandating the insertion of Bible teaching into the public schools when, as in Ohio, needed school funding and other immediate issues for the state’s public schools are apparent. For years, for example, we have read about teachers leaving Oklahoma for nearby Texas, where teachers’ salaries are higher. In the most recent in a series of reports tracking teachers’ salaries, the Economic Policy Institute showed that in Oklahoma, the disparity between the salaries of teachers and other comparably trained professionals is forth largest in the nation. The only states where teachers’ salaries are more inadequate are Colorado, Arizona, and Virginia.
The President and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Rachel Laser released the following statement about Ryan Walter’s act to command Bible teaching in all of Oklahoma’s public schools: “Public schools are not Sunday schools… This is textbook Christian Nationalism. Walters is abusing the power of his public office to impose his religious beliefs on everyone else’s children… Christian Nationalists and their lawmaker allies want to replace school counselors with religious chaplains, allow teachers and coaches to pray with students, teach Creationism in science classes, and ban books and censor curricula that feature LGBTQ+ people and racial and religious minorities.”
Two sociologists, Philip S. Gorski at Yale University and Samuel L. Perry at the University of Oklahoma, define the mythology of white Christian nationalism in their excellent book, The Flag and the Cross: “White Christian nationalism is a ‘deep story’ about America’s past and a vision of its future. It includes cherished assumptions about what America was and is, but also what it it should be… America was founded as a Christian nation by (white) men who were ‘traditional’ Christians, who based the nation’s founding documents on ‘Christian principles.’ The United States is blessed by God, which is why it has been so successful; and the nation has a special role to play in God’s plan for humanity. But these blessings are threatened by cultural degradation from ‘un-American’ influences both inside and outside our borders.” (The Flag and The Cross, pp. 3-4)
Gorski and Perry conclude: “White Christian nationalism is our term for the ethno-traditionalism among many white Americans that conflates racial, religious, and national identity (the deep story) and pines for cultural and political power that demographic and cultural shifts have increasingly threatened…. (T)he term Christian in white Christian nationalism is often far more akin to a dog whistle that calls out to an aggrieved tribe than a description of the content of one’s faith.” (The Flag and The Cross, p. 44)
In an opinion piece for CNN, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee on Religious Liberty, Amanda Tyler succinctly defines how Christian nationalists like Oklahoma State Schools Superintendent Ryan Walters, “threaten the careful balance worked out over more than half a century by the courts, presidential administrations from both parties and a diverse set of interest groups about how best to recognize the religious freedom rights of students, teachers and administrators in our pluralistic public schools. These recent developments are… just the latest examples of a concerted strategy to inject the political ideology of Christian nationalism into public education. Christian nationalism, which merges Christian and American identities, relies on a false narrative of the U.S. as a ‘Christian nation’—a country founded by Christians and for Christians. Such mythology betrays our history and constitutional framework, which created a separation between the institutions of religion and government so that all religions could flourish without the state’s control.”
This is an important video. It shows how the coverage of Biden is one-sided and how the republicans at their convention did all the same things they accuse Biden of. He says the news won’t cover it. I agree but not for the same reasons, the media is now corporate media is pushing for a tRump victory. Hugs with a mask from a sick Scottie
Donald Trump has chosen J.D. Vance as his running mate, the former president announced on Monday.
Vance, a first-term Republican senator from Ohio, was widely expected to be Trump’s vice presidential pick as the pool of potential hopefuls narrowed earlier in the day. Just hours before the announcement, several outlets reported that Gov. Doug Burgum (R-N.D.) and U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) were informed by the Trump campaign that they would not be on the 2024 ticket. Others previously thought to be on Trump’s short list included Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), U.S. House Rep. Elise Stefanink (R-N.Y.), and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson.
In a post on his own tech platform, Truth Social, Trump lauded Vance as the “person best suited to assume the position of Vice President of the United States.”
“J.D. honorably served our Country in the Marine Corps, graduated from Ohio State University in two years, Summa Cum Laude, and is a Yale Law School Graduate, where he was Editor of The Yale Law Journal, and President of the Yale Law Veterans Association,” he said, adding that he “will be strongly focused on the people he fought so brilliantly for, the American Workers and Farmers in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, and far beyond.”
The choice of Vance, who rose to fame as the author of the controversial memoir Hillbilly Elegy, was likely intended to help Trump shore up support among white, lower-income voters in the Midwest, where President Joe Biden is considered vulnerable in the 2024 race. According to poll averages from FiveThirtyEight, Trump leads Biden by more than nine points in Vance’s home state of Ohio, and Biden also trails in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Biden would likely need to win all three of the latter states to stave off a second Trump term, with swing states like Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada also looking vulnerable in 2024.
A former critic of Trump who recast himself as a politician in the MAGA model, Vance’s LGBTQ+ record differs very little from the man at the top of his ticket. During his two years in the U.S. Senate, Vance opposed the Respect for Marriage Act, which codified federal same-sex marriage rights in the event that Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2004 ruling legalizing marriage equality, is repealed by the Supreme Court. He also authored the Protect Children’s Innocence Act, which would make it a class C felony, punishable by up to 15 years in prison, to provide gender-affirming surgery to trans minors. (This despite the fact that transition surgeries are rarely offered to patients under the age of 18 and only in cases of extreme medical need.)
Additionally, Vance is a supporter of the so-called “parent’s rights” movement, which advocates that LGBTQ+ students be outed to their parents and seeks to remove queer-affirming resources from classrooms. He has repeatedly referred to opponents of those actions as “groomers,” such as in an April 2022 post on X. “I’ll stop calling people ‘groomers’ when they stop freaking out about bills that prevent the sexualization of my children,” he wrote at the time.
The 39-year-old politician has also opposed diversity and inclusion in the U.S. armed forces, suggesting that he is likely to support re-banning trans servicemembers from the military should Trump be elected. “American political leaders should stop using America’s military as a social justice side project,” his 2022 campaign site reads. “Troops don’t need to focus on diversity or equity or any other progressive buzzword; they need to focus on fighting and winning America’s wars.” The removal of trans troops from the military is a major component of Project 2025, a set of far-right policy proposals shaped and promoted by the anti-LGBTQ+ Heritage Foundation, which Trump has sought to distance himself from in recent days.
Vance’s anti-LGBTQ+ background also includes claiming that Biden supports Ukraine because Russian President Vladimir Putin is anti-trans and blaming the “childless left” for America’s decline, specifically citing U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. Furthermore, he once accused U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) of making up the term “Two-Spirit,” which is broadly embraced by LGBTQ+ Native Americans to describe their identities. “Would love if progressives just stopped inventing words,” Vance posted on X in February 2021.
In repeatedly opposing LGBTQ+ equality, Vance has found a perfect match in Trump, whose administration was responsible for more than 200 attacks on queer rights in four years, according to GLAAD. These assaults included repealing protections for trans students, removing resources for LGBTQ+ Americans from federal websites, decimating funding for global HIV/AIDS prevention, and appointing a record-number of judges opposed to LGBTQ+ equality. His administration also made it harder for marginally housed people to find safe shelter and opposed workplace protections for LGBTQ+ employees.
Trump, whose own supporters threatened to kill his last vice president for refusing to support Trump’s 2020 bid to remain in office, is likely to resume many of those policies if reelected in November.
Sen. J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s 2024 running mate
Scottie's Playtime 