The Great Twitter Skedaddle of 2024

If there's any positives in the wake of the disastrous 2024 election results, it's that a lot of people on social media are voting with their feet and fleeing Elon Musk's Twitter (stop calling everything X, you moron) in droves (via Luca Ittimani at the Guardian US): 

Social media platform Bluesky has picked up more than 1 million new users since the US election, as users seek to escape misinformation and offensive posts on X.

The influx, largely from North America and the UK, has helped Bluesky reach nearly 15 million users worldwide, up from 9 million in September, the company said.

Social media researcher Axel Bruns said the platform offered an alternative to X, formerly Twitter, including a more effective system for blocking or suspending problematic accounts and policing harmful behaviour.

“It’s become a refuge for people who want to have the kind of social media experience that Twitter used to provide, but without all the far-right activism, the misinformation, the hate speech, the bots and everything else,” he said.

What had happened since Musk's hostile buyout of Twitter is that Musk brought back a lot of the Far Right - even Nazi-fueled - vitriol under the excuse of "free speech". Not only did Musk gut the staffing needed to manage the social media environs, he also gutted many of the protections that the app had put in place to protect users from harassment and direct attacks. Indeed, one of the truly last straws that drove people away from Twitter is a rule change Musk enforced on blocking that effectively made the tool useless.

When Musk bought Twitter back in 2022, I questioned - and found my own answer - why a billionaire was so desperate to waste $44 billion like that:

Forget the line he's trying to sell to the public about his interest in Twitter. This is not about encouraging free speech, or bringing his "brand" of innovation to improve security or service to a cornerstone of global social media. No, what Elon Musk is doing is Buying speech, there is nothing FREE about what he's doing. From here it's looking like Musk wants control over one of the many social networks that have openly derided his - and other billionaires' - obsessions with space travel, his self-marketing overkill, his lack of genuine philanthropy, his business model of racism in his workplaces, and more.

Musk's call for a more open Twitter runs the serious risk of creating an environment of lax rules governing online behavior. Twitter already has problems with online harassers, raging haters, and sociopathic doxxers looking to bully and threaten people because of their gender, ethnicity, religious beliefs, and/or political beliefs. Musk is poised to make things worse...

Well, now it's post-election 2024 and we have a clear answer: Musk spent all that money so he could campaign for donald trump, pushing lie after lie on his own account(s) to prop up trump's chances, and gaslighting a low-information electorate into voting for the goddamned rapist/felon. Musk alone didn't win the election for trump, but he clearly assisted in the damage done.

And so with that, whatever counts as a liberal/progressive audience within Twitter is bolting for the lifeboats to head over to Bluesky.

There are other social media apps similar to Twitter that people already set up accounts; such as Facebook Threads, Counter Social, and Spoutible. Bluesky quickly became the destination of choice because they set up an effective blocking system that can prevent the more hostile and deceptive Far Right trolls from gaining any audience there.

The Far Right "Free Speechers" are already complaining about the blocks - "Waah, you're denying me my right to be heard" - but for all that the First Amendment represents there should be an individual's right to NOT LISTEN TO YOUR BULLSHIT. We have the freedom to peaceably assemble with like-minded persons, and the haters do not have a right to bulldoze their way in and shout at everybody until we surrender to their hate.

We don't want to listen to your gaslighting fearmongering, Nazis, and you can't make us.

As for myself, I kept saying I was leaving Twitter after Musk bought it out, but I kept getting dragged back in because like a fool I wanted to stick around and document the atrocities. Well, no longer. I don't owe Musk or any of the haters that took over Twitter another second of my time. So I downloaded an archive for the last time, waiting until I got the ZIP file, and then parted ways with Twitter with a final salute to the goddamn billionaire who ruined it all:

Both barrels, motherfucker

No regrets, America.

See you on Bluesky at @paulwartenberg.bsky.social 

The Beltway Freakout

Talent is a wonderful thing, but it won't carry a quitter.
-- Duma Key, Stephen King

I had to block Stephen King today.

Biden won the primaries in convincing fashion. An overwhelming majority of Democratic voters support him then AND now. But here you are, listening to a panicked biased media having a meltdown over one bad debate. You're not paying attention. And I'm blocking you for this.

— Witty Librarian 2024 (@PaulWartenberg) July 8, 2024

What the hell happened?

Well, that CNN debate I didn't want to watch ended up being a down performance for Biden, which unfortunately flared up all the damn "he's too old" takes between the New York Times and every other media outlet.

It's gotten to where the mainstream media - and then slowly a number of backbencher Democratic congresscritters, and then the avalanche of social media names like King and Rob Reiner - kept calling for Biden - who has already secured the 2024 Democratic nomination - to drop out of the Presidential race "for the good of the country."

Which is, of course, a total bullshit move.

This is after Joe Biden's campaign fund-raised far more than what trump's did. This is while Biden's polling regained their numbers - and upticked in several battleground states - after the immediate aftermath of the debate.

I've complained about this rump media - sitting in judgment of the Democratic Party and never focusing on the public sins of the Republicans - before. They get a narrative going in their own circles - such as this "Biden is now too old and will lose to trump" and there's no shaking it. Worse, they start digging for "sources" to reinforce that narrative using anybody they could claim is "inside the room when it happens" such as a "former senior official" who probably was a six-month intern in the West Wing washroom two years ago. And when they get any facts wrong, these pundits refuse to re-evaluate their mistakes and double-down on the scalp hunting.

Remember in the modern journalism era among the Beltway elites, there is no punishment for being wrong. There may be punishments for the low-level elected figures in the Democratic ranks buying into the media-inflicted panic, but that may have to wait until this election cycle is over.

Everything Biden has been doing the last two weeks post-debate has been to stay on-message and campaigning, even as a group of self-appointed "saviors" in the papers, cable shows, and congressional back rooms dreaming of their own fantasies are trying to kneecap him. They're going so far as to convince the upcoming convention delegates to toss aside Biden's primary victories - where Biden won with full support of the Dem voting base - and force an open convention.

Never mind the chaos and destruction that move would inflict on the entire Democratic Party, weakening themselves by alienating an electoral base fully backing Biden. And all of this much to the delight of both the Republican Party as well as the media elites who push the decades-old "Dems In Disarray" narrative.

While the media and the party leadership distract themselves over this noise, the same Beltway talking heads can avoid discussing more relevant and vital matters, such as the fact that the Republican Party's presidential candidate is a convicted felon and confirmed sex offender. Even as the GOP's platform is coming up before their convention next week, with a horrifying "Project 2025" agenda just barely getting on the radar for the voting public to recoil from it.

This shouldn't be a distraction. This shouldn't even be an issue.

Most Democratic voters may have these concerns, but they've overlooked them to focus on the reality that Joe Biden's administration has been mostly a success for the nation. The Dem voters may worry about Biden's age, but they understand there's an existing system in place - the 25th Amendment, and VP Kamala Harris - that will take care of it.

What worries most Democratic voters I know is the fact of donald trump's entire existence, and the real threat he poses should he get anywhere near the White House again. In spite of the polls which we've learned are skewing too rural (and too Republican) - in spite of all the fearmongering that the mainstream media is spewing for their own enjoyment - there is still a fighting mood with the party base to stick with a candidate in Biden they know beat trump in 2020. They're not about to abandon a good incumbent now.

This is - for anyone who lived through 2016 - the same kind of concern-trolling bullshit we got out of the New York Times and the rest of the Beltway when they freaked out over Hillary's private server and fretted over "but her emails." Back then, they begged for her to step aside for - get this - Biden. This is also the same freakout we got out of the mainstream media when Obama suffered a bad debate night against Romney in 2012, and they begged Obama to step aside for someone better like - get this - Hillary.

The Democratic voters - and the indy voters who sided with Biden in 2020 - need to get past this noise and get the damn vote out. The election still matters: OUR VOTES STILL MATTER. We had 81 million people turn out for Biden and Harris in 2020 and we can do that again this 2024.

I'm Just Waiting On a Monday (Suck It, trump)

You might notice that despite all on the harrumphing from me about how Elon Musk destroyed Twitter that I'm still on there. Like spotting a car wreck on I-4, I can't look away and need to fulfill my Reply Guy urges. (Also, I want to be there when Musk implodes Twitter: Screw you, Elon, I'm deadnaming it 'cause calling it X is stupid) 

Having mentioned how donald trump (lowercase-naming him) spent the past week filing last-minute legal appeals against the pending April 15th Manhattan criminal trial over his hush money payments, I had a Reply Guy moment on Twitter that I'd like to share on this blog:

Top 10 trump excuses to delay trial
10) Dog ate paperwork
9) Eric ate paperwork
8) Blinded by staring at eclipse AGAIN
7) Accidentally mailed himself to Guam
6) Taking over OJ's hunt for real killer
5) Claims he already won
4) (redacted)
3) Cofveve
2) The Boogie
1) BUT HER EMAILS

— Witty Librarian 2024 (@PaulWartenberg) April 13, 2024

I had to take the "thes" out of the sentences to fit Twitter character count, by the by.

Ron Filipkowski is someone I follow and reply/requote often, also by the by.

It's a little bit of levity - and a shit-ton of schadenfreude - waiting for Monday to roll up tomorrow, with trump forced to sit in the courtroom during jury selection knowing that this is no longer something he can control.

Justice is coming, trump. No more delays. Cower like the coward you are.

P.S.: Tank the stock. SELL MORTIMER, SELL!

A Quick Reminder How BAD trump Was As We Head Into 2024

Saw this on Twitter (screw your X, Elon) and needed to share:

The thing that gets me about Trump is that not only is he a terrible person and his policies mostly just jumbled nonsense. It’s that he’s a terrible administrator- people seemed to have memory-holed how dysfunctional his Administration was. Nobody who worked for him praises him.

— Aaron Astor (@AstorAaron) February 2, 2024

Every tell-all book, every post-administration interview of trump's Cabinet members and advisors, every single story we got out of those dark years told us how trump would berate and belittle his own people, insult them to their faces, mock their expertise. trump drove half his staff to resign every six months by my recollection, and the ones who stayed on the whole tenure were doing so to manage their own grifts.

trump was an agent of chaos, unlike any other Active-Negative force we had sitting in the Oval Office. The likes of Nixon, Johnson, Hoover, Wilson... at least they maintained some form of self-discipline and awareness.

Even if trump fails to make himself dictator should he ever cheat his way back into the White House, his failures as a leader will tear this nation apart for good. We barely survived the last time.

For the LOVE OF GOD AND COUNTRY, America, do NOT vote trump this 2024.

 

Planning Our Escape from Twitter to... Where?

Well, after six months of insane mismanagement by Elon Musk, this past weekend of enforcing data limits on viewing is pretty much the death knell of Twitter. It's now a question how quickly this ship will sink into the Atlantic. Anne Laurie over at Balloon Juice has a number of details - especially how Musk is failing to pay his bills - which would be better to read at her article before returning back here, please and thanks. Here's a GIF of Titanic failure to pass the time until you return.

via GIPHY

Ever since Musk overpaid for Twitter - seriously, 44 BILLION?! - he has fired most of his workforce, tried to cheat employment safety guidelines, sought to make Twitter users PAY for something that had been free for them for more than a decade, allowed haters and racists back in order to spike reader interest, and eventually committed to this act of self-immolation as if to drive even addicted Tweeters - sighs and points to mirror - to flee for their lives.

I mean, I know I promised to walk away from Twitter, and I tried... for about a week, before I got pulled back by the fact most people I know were still using it, and because it was still a quick and powerful way to gain near-instant news. A lot of people pledged to get off the ship back then, and yet... We were too used (too addicted) to the app.

But we're looking at the likely abandonment of Twitter within this month as more people get frustrated with Musk's growing incompetence at managing things. It does not help Musk that more alternatives to his app are cropping up.

I had for example jumped onto CounterSocial last November. Only because a favorite for everyone else - Mastadon - was too frustrating for me to install and set up. It wasn't intuitive or helpful. Sadly not a lot of people I knew crossed onto CS, there was no audience to share, so I hadn't kept up with it.

Soon after, an alternative called Spoutible showed up, and I was able to register onto that relatively easy. It mimics a lot of features on Twitter and it should be the easiest app to shift to, except not everybody has, partly because of early controversy with Spoutible's owner being a jerk and mostly because (see below)...

Another app called BlueSky showed up a couple months ago, promising to be the best possible replacement, and it's using the Beta testing process to encourage users to invite their friends in order to make BlueSky more desirable (for those of us who never sat at the cool kids' table, this is high school all over again sigh) to join. As Twitter collapsed this weekend, BlueSky invites skyrocketed (pun intended).

And just this Monday, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook I mean Meta announced the speedup of a new app tied into the Facebook/Instagram services called Threads, which dropped this morning late Wednesday night and already got 30 million users to where Musk is threatening to sue Zuck out of spite. While shifting over to an app most people already have - Facebook has 2.99 billion users globally and Instagram which ties into Threads has 2.35 billion - would be a no-brainer, there are security and privacy concerns about the transition that makes me wary.

As you see, while Twitter is sinking, we humans are overwhelmed with choices we didn't have when Twitter started back in 2006. The instant sharing of tweets - faster than newswires and RSS feeds, easier to send to millions of readers than emails or texts - was a novel and unique software app for its day. But now that Musk is punching holes into his own luxury liner to make it sink faster, the survivors queuing for the lifeboats can't make a clean decision on which arriving cruise ship to join.

I mean, we could even go join up on Discord and tie-in to our multiplayer gaming habits, but that just breaks down to such specific cliques that general sharing could never be a reality. And hell, I am digressing here.

So, if you're keeping up at home:

Twitter: still there at https://twitter.com/PaulWartenberg playing the trumpet with the band until the ship sinks for good.

CounterSocial: Can be found at https://counter.social/@pwartenberg but I'm not sure how often I will show up, but send me a tell when you get there.

Spoutible: I'm at https://spoutible.com/PaulWartenberg and I am trying to make it a habit of cross-posting my blog flogs to increase traffic from there.

BlueSky: (I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not... /cries)

Threads: Nope, not unless they PAY me to do it.

And I'm curious, are there OTHER social apps out there playing for Twitter's market share...?

(Keeps playing Herb Alpert's "Rise" until the waters reach the deck)

"Gentlemen, it has been a priv---" (suddenly gets invite to BlueSky) "Every sucker for himself! I'm out of here!" (flees)

Update 7/21/23: Holy sh-t I DID get an invite to BlueSky. You can find me there as @paulwartenberg.bsky.social 

The Day a Young Woman Nuked a Misogynist From Orbit (w/ Update)

Normally I don't double-blog on a day, but this story is both disturbing and hilarious that it deserves attention.

It seems earlier this week, a social pariah named Andrew Tate - former kickboxer, open misogynist, and unrepentant cigar smoker - was allowed back on Twitter under Elon Musk's umbrella policy of letting wingnut assholes back online, and Tate immediately tried to insult/flirt with known environmental activist Greta Thunberg, taunting her with declarations about all the gas-guzzling cars he owns. Referring to Rodlyn-Mae Banting at Jezebel for more:

The self-identified misogynist, 36, tweeted at 19-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg for some reason about the 33 cars he owns. “Please provide your email address so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions,” he wrote, attaching a photo of himself filling up one of his aforementioned many cars presumably to prove his immense wealth and unmatched masculinity...

Thunberg provided the only sane response:

yes, please do enlighten me. email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com https://t.co/V8geeVvEvg

— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) December 28, 2022

The rest of the Internet pretty much cheered Greta for her putdown, and declared her Queen of the Mic Drops for the month of December.

The celebrations of Greta's victory were kind of like this

It gets sicker/funnier from here:

A badly burned Tate responded to Thunberg’s tweet with only, “How dare you!?,” and then started furiously retweeting the few fans of his insisting he won the battle he started for no reason...

The former professional kickboxer and 2016 Big Brother contestant has been raising eyebrows for some time for spewing a seemingly endless stream of sexist hatred, but things reached a head earlier this year when his online misogyny was seeping into classrooms and affecting young boys’ behavior all over the world. Since then, Tate has been banned from most social media platforms, including Twitter. In late November, Elon “Free Speech Absolutist” Musk reinstated Tate’s Twitter account shortly after taking over the company, which seemed at the time to be a horrific move. But it turns out Musk did the internet a favor, because we all got to witness this sad excuse of a man get the dragging he deserves in real time before the year’s end...

Well, Tate did follow up with a few more mocking tweets. One of those tweets was a video of him sitting in a kitchen, eating pizza and lighting up a cigar like he was the lord of his dominion.

Turns out, that video turned into a huge self-own when the Romanian police - looking for Tate on allegations he committed human sex trafficking - used that photo to realize he was in their country at that very moment, and descended on his residence with arrest warrants in hand. Back to Jezebel, this time with Laura Bassett:

A Twitter spat that misogynist social media personality Andrew Tate started with 19-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg over his masculinity led Romanian authorities to arrest him and his brother, Tristan, for human trafficking and rape on Thursday, according to local media and police.

Tate had taunted Thunberg on Twitter about his 33 cars, to which Thunberg replied with a joke about “small dick energy” that racked up millions of likes. Tate then posted a humiliating two-minute video of himself smoking a cigar in a robe and insisting that he was not owned at all by teen girl. But he seems to have really fucked up there: A local pizza shop listed on the box in the video reportedly tipped off authorities as to his whereabouts.

As a side note: They have pizza chains in Romania??? 

Police raided his villa and detained the Tates on suspicions of sex trafficking. Semafor reports that the suspects “allegedly used a ‘loverboy method’ to lure victims into marriages and then sexually and mentally abused them to perform in exploitative videos, authorities said.”

If Tate ends up in prison because Greta Thunberg bodied him on Twitter with a small dick joke, it will be the most chef’s kiss ending to his story the world has ever seen...

This story starts off creepy, with a known misogynist (33 years old) sending tweets to a woman almost half his age (Greta is now 19, but still way too young for him) in one of those "oh god, he's being a perv towards her" kind of vibes. She gets her revenge in public by labeling his faux Alpha Male BS as "small dick energy," which clearly knee-groined Tate in his pride, angering him enough to respond... only to have that response condemn himself with arrest on rape and trafficking charges. 

The schadenfreude is too delicious, more tasty than pizza. 

Yes, I went there.

It's turning out Tate shouldn't have.

BWHAHAHAHA.

Update: I just want to make sure that the reports on Tate's arrest are credible. The Guardian is covering the story, and they're very reliable. 

Look For Me On Counter Social Now (w/Update)

With all the talk the last two weeks of Elon Musk's destruction of Twitter as a corporate entity - his mass firings, driving the employees to flee under demands of "hardcore" doubling down on work, pushing for fee-based services that would drive users away, and allowing for extremist BS to spread that would drive advertisers away - most everybody hadn't actually quit Twitter because we were enjoying the drama too much, and some of us were masochistic enough to stay to watch the pending technological collapse of the media app in real-time.

It would have to take an act of sadism and cluelessness for Musk to drive people away from Twitter even as he was driving the app over the cliffs, and Musk reached that today with the announcement that he's letting donald trump - who lied, bullied, lied more, mocked people, lied a lot more, and made outrageous demands through his Twitter feed on an hourly basis until he crossed too many lines and got banned - back on twitter without restraint.

With that, I made my announcement and made my peace. Goodbye, Twitter.

I will not support a Twitter where Elon Musk brings back a lying, racist monster like trump without consequences to let him poison this forum any further. I am gone. Goodbye Twitter, and good luck. look for me on @pwartenberg@counter.social#RIPTwitter #ElonMuskIsATroll

— Witty Librarian For Ukraine (@PaulWartenberg) November 20, 2022

I am done with Twitter now, and if it falls apart under the strain of too few workers keeping it together with duct tape and spit, then I will just have to read about it on NPR's website when it happens.

I will miss you all. Except for the ones I know on Discord and Facebook, mostly the Lost Golden Horde Battalion of the TNC.

You can find me now on the alternative social media app Counter.Social under @pwartenberg and I wish you good luck in your journeys ahead.

More to say about this hectic month later. A little too busy with NaNo and with working a vendor table at Lake County Comic Con this Sunday.

I will part with this, my most famous tweet of all time:

that's how it starts, with the oohing and the ahhing. then comes the screaming and the running... pic.twitter.com/iZDXx7T4EQ

— Witty Librarian For Ukraine (@PaulWartenberg) April 9, 2017

Update: I'm also looking into this HIVE app, but it's mobile-only.

Even Further Update (12/5/22): Well, damn. HIVE turned out to be a bit unhelpful. Counter Social works okay but I'm having a hard time finding people and following them. In the meanwhile, Musk may have invited trump to rejoin Twitter but it turns out trump signed an exclusive rights deal with his own (failing) social media app, meaning trump legally can't get on Twitter even if he wanted to. It all turned into Much Ado About Nothing, I suppose. Anyway, Musk is turning out to be a real idiot running the company into the ground, and violating a ton of international labor laws in the process. I will see you back on the Titanic on the Twitter feed, peeps.

Even Further Revision to the Update (12/11/22): Going back to Twitter is not a good idea. Elon Musk is intentionally promoting every bad-faith right-wing meme on the site, in the process of defaming former Twitter officials in order to justify letting extremists promoting violence and misinformation to return to the site. Other people I know are going back to quitting the site, refusing to let their traffic contribute to Musk's stat numbers. Musk is intentionally starting fights to get views. It's disgusting.

Twitter Now Has a New Master

Well, back in April a fellah by the name of Elon Musk was trying to buy his way onto the board of the publicly-owned Twitter company, but got stymied by the rules and then decided to waste $44 billion to buy the social media app outright.

Well, after months of Musk trying to weasel his way out of the deal - when it proved to hurt his overall net worth - only to have the Twitter board sue in Chancery court - yes, that is a thing - to force Musk to buy them out - hey, $44 billion ain't nothing to sneeze at - this week an arrangement was finalized and Musk now owns Twitter.

Well, what the FUCK happens now?

If we go with what Shirin Ghaffary says at Vox Recode: 

Until relatively recently, Musk’s primary business interests were in building electric cars, rockets, and underground tunnels. Now, he will have to figure out a new, very different business challenge: how to effectively run a social media platform that’s used by nearly 400 million people — including highly influential world leaders, journalists, and other public figures — and deal with the political speech moderation issues that come with that. Musk also needs to figure out a better business model for the company. Twitter has never made nearly as much money as its social media competitors like Facebook and YouTube, and along with other major tech companies, it has also seen a major decline in its stock value in the past year. According to a recent report in Reuters, the service’s most active and lucrative users have been leaving in droves since the pandemic...

That last part is kind of shocking to me. Social media like Twitter was the only way we could keep in touch during the COVID pandemic! Anyway:

Musk’s most consistent messaging about why he wants to buy Twitter is that he wants it to be an open digital town square of ideas, without intervention. He has said that he will allow anyone to say anything they want on the platform, as long as it’s legal...

The recent proliferation of “free speech”-themed platforms like Parler, Truth Social, and Gettr have shown that if you let anyone say whatever they want on a social media app, there’s a good chance that app could become a hate-filled, toxic place — which is why even these relatively more lax platforms have some basic content moderation policies.

There’s a lot of perfectly legal stuff you can say that is unpleasant to look at: racial slurs, graphic violent content, bullying, spam (more on that later). That type of content is generally bad for business because most users — and advertisers — don’t want to be around it...

It should be noted that after one day of crowing "free speech," Musk changed his tune and is "setting up a committee on content moderation" to set rules, hinting at the reality that the advertisers keeping Twitter afloat REALLY want moderation to work. But I can't see how Musk can establish a safe and working public forum if he goes through on his earlier calls to un-ban donald trump: 

...Musk’s comments about bringing back Trump, paired with his free speech mantra, has made him popular with conservatives who have long felt censored by Twitter and other social media companies, despite the fact that there hasn’t been tangible evidence of systematic anti-conservative bias and conservative influencers continue to have massive followings on platforms like Twitter.

While many conservatives would cheer Trump’s return to Twitter, it would simultaneously prompt major resistance from people, many of them liberal, who argue that his tweets pose a threat to a peaceful democracy. We’ll see how Elon is prepared to handle that blowback if he does reinstate the former president...

It won't be pretty. I know a handful of fellow Tweeters who will flee in protest if the Rioter-in-Chief is brought back without anything reining in trump's worst impulses, and I may jump off the platform myself if it happens.

The problem with trump isn't a matter of Free Speech, it's Hate Speech: trump is a prime example of how Hate Speech undermines the public discourse, and increases the risk of violence towards those regardless if they're on social media or not. I think I've argued before about the damage of Hate Speech, and that it shouldn't be given First Amendment protections. The foundation of any Hate Speech is lies - distortions and insults and defaming characterizations of people to dehumanize them - and every result of Hate Speech are acts of violence like mass shootings at churches, temples, schools, shopping malls, pretty much everywhere.

Elon Musk - who has never shown much understanding outside of marketing himself as a business genius and Futurist technophile - doesn't seem to understand the seriousness of the First Amendment debates. The constant struggle between allowing individuals the right to speak their minds but countering the civil right needs to protect other individuals who can get harmed by hateful rhetoric.

If Musk is buying into Twitter as a foothold into an effort to buy into social media to expand the app into a larger, life-dominating platform, he's going to have to come to terms with what's harmful and what's safe.

I honestly don't think he understands the pitfalls he's about to face.

I honestly think Twitter is going to get fucked up in a bad way.

Shall We See The End of Tweeting Soon?

Welp, all my efforts as a Gen Xer to stay hip and cool with all the newest social media apps since 2007 have all gone for naught, because one of the apps I've gotten addicted to in the past 15 years might finally crash and burn now that another oligarch has seen fit to buy his way into media domination.

In short: Greedhead Elon Musk just bought out Twitter for 44 BILLION DOLLARS. Via Lauren Feiner at CNBC: 

Twitter’s board has accepted an offer from billionaire Elon Musk to buy the social media company and take it private, the company announced Monday...

The cash deal at $54.20 per share is valued at around $44 billion, according to the press release. Twitter would become a private company on completion of the deal, which requires shareholder and regulatory approval...

Okay, my first thought was "Crap, they're letting the narcissistic billionaires in, there goes the neighborhood."

Second thought was "WHERE THE HELL DID MUSK DREDGE UP 44 BILLION DOLLARS in the first place???" Was that pocket change hiding in the sofa cushions or something?

Seriously, you know anybody with 44 BILLION DOLLARS lying around they can use to just buy a large-scale social media app like they were buying groceries?

Why even bother to spend so much in the first place? Musk tried buying his way onto the company's board a week or two ago, only to get thwarted by some of the regulations set in place for publicly-traded companies. So, his solution was to sledgehammer the entire process with a massive buyout and take Twitter private.

Why the hell is he so desperate trying to buy this social media app?

Forget the line he's trying to sell to the public about his interest in Twitter. This is not about encouraging free speech, or bringing his "brand" of innovation to improve security or service to a cornerstone of global social media. No, what Elon Musk is doing is Buying speech, there is nothing FREE about what he's doing. From here it's looking like Musk wants control over one of the many social networks that have openly derided his - and other billionaires' - obsessions with space travel, his self-marketing overkill, his lack of genuine philanthropy, his business model of racism in his workplaces, and more.

Musk's call for a more open Twitter runs the serious risk of creating an environment of lax rules governing online behavior. Twitter already has problems with online harassers, raging haters, and sociopathic doxxers looking to bully and threaten people because of their gender, ethnicity, religious beliefs, and/or political beliefs. Musk is poised to make things worse.

While Twitter as a social media app eventually became a business looking for ad revenues and profitability, it still served as a relatively free and easy-to-use app that people rallied to as a means to get instant news and updates from people they know, in a way faster and more satisfying than other major apps like Facebook. Its limited character count required savvy messaging in short sentences, allowing for clever snark and witty repartee (but also the trolling nightmares of direct insults and death threats).

For ill and for good, Twitter became a dominant means of getting news AND opinions out there, which mainstream media scooped up and gobbled for all its worth. On the bright side, it connected the world in ways other social media apps couldn't, passing along news of tragedies and victories faster than professional reporters could. It got the messages out in places and situations where dictators and despots couldn't stop them.

On the dark side, it got us donald trump tweeting out his racism and sexism and bullshit gaslighting. It got bad enough to where even Twitter had to suspend his ass because trump crossed the code of conduct lines too many times.

Rumor is Elon Musk is looking to buy Twitter so he could open up the rules of conduct and allow the likes of trump back on it, possibly seeing money to be made on ragetweets attracting more views than ever before. It seems unlikely, given how eager a lot of current Twitter users are about to jump ship if Musk ever invites that Shitgibbon back on. It's more likely Musk would make an attempt to overwhelm Twitter users with his godless Bitcoin crypto scams.

Either way, we're seeing an end to a troubled yet useful social media app getting bought out by a billionaire ready to twist that product into an unrecognizable mess. Sort of like what happened to Tumblr, which never recovered from unpopular policy changes under new management. 

The talk now is about escape plans. Saving your Twitter history to a zipped archive for future civilizations to find. The next social media app everyone can congregate to that won't be threatened by an oligarch's buyout anytime soon.

It's not TikTok by the way. China owns THAT already.

Got Myself Back Into Twitter Jail

I punched a man in Retweet just to watch him die...

Apparently, trying to encourage sportswriter/ESPN celebrity Katie Nolan to hunt down a misogynistic  tweeter and punch him is a line too far for the modern Twitter sensibility.

Right now, I've been banned for 6 days, meaning I can read tweets but can't reply or retweet them, or post new tweets of me own. I *can* Direct Message people if I need to, but it's not stuff that will be out there for the social media consumption.

But this is okay. This is a price to pay for being on social media. Sometimes, you cross a line and you gotta answer for breaking that rule. I get that. It's not like I need to tweet every minute of the day.

(knee starts twitching)

My entire life isn't on Twitter, or Facebook, hell I'm halfway off FB I barely do any social stuff there now, it's just working the library's Page to promote our events and all.

(slight agitation with the eyes blinking a little more than they should)

I can quit at any time! Sure! I don't need Twitter! (twitching becomes more pronounced) I can just go back to the Usenet chats! Where's my link to alt.tv.x-files! I'm totally fine with this! SIX DAYS WITHOUT TWEETING WILL BE A SWEET VACATION FOR ME! I CAN ACTUALLY GET SOME WORK DONE, LIKE VACUUMING THE LIVING ROOM OR SOMETHING! WHO EVEN NEEDS TO TWEET ANYMORE, I MEAN trump's BEEN BANNED FOR LIFE! I AM SO GOOD WITH THIS, I PROBABLY... PROBABLY...

(sees a tweet from Matt Gaetz) OH SWEET JESUS I NEED TO REPLY TO THIS SO BAD! LEMME IN! LEMME IN! I PROMISE I'LL BEHAVE! 

(begins banging the jail bars) ATTICA! ATTICA!!!!!!!

trump Twitter in Twilight

Things have been hectic since Wednesday, when our government almost fell to a seditious riot by trumpian Brownshirts, but one major development since then has been Twitter - the social media app trump used the most to stir up rage and madness the last five years - finally banning trump for his ongoing hate-filled rhetoric. 

They first suspended his account for 12 hours because of a Tweet he posted post-riot that called for more "protests" (hint hint, more violence), with the promise he could get back online once he removed the offending Tweet. So he deleted it, and he got back on...

And pretty much posted a more rage-filled Tweet that proved he didn't learn his lesson to behave by Twitter User Agreement policy.

After all that drama, Twitter suspended his account permanently (they may recover it later, after January 20, because of national archival reasons) and then had to give a public statement to why they had to do this:

After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them — specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter — we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence. 

In the context of horrific events this week, we made it clear on Wednesday that additional violations of the Twitter Rules would potentially result in this very course of action. Our public interest framework exists to enable the public to hear from elected officials and world leaders directly. It is built on a principle that the people have a right to hold power to account in the open. 

However, we made it clear going back years that these accounts are not above our rules entirely and cannot use Twitter to incite violence, among other things. We will continue to be transparent around our policies and their enforcement...

I've gotten in a few debates about Free Speech before, regarding how Hate Speech was - and still is - a serious violation of what Free Speech stands for. We have to remember the First Amendment is NOT an absolute right. For example, shouting "FIRE" in a crowded theater to cause a panic will get you arrested. Threating to kill someone will get you arrested for harassment/verbal assault. Standing before a mob encouraging them to go storming into a government building to disrupt an election count should get you arrested for incitement to riot.

This is all trump's public speeches have been, ever since he rolled down that escalator in 2015 and launched his campaign on a diatribe against Mexicans and the Chinese. trump has been crossing the line of decency on social media for years, throughout every call to Twitter's ownership and internal security that trump was violating their code nearly every day.

It had to take an actual coup attempt with people wounded and killed in the Capitol building for Twitter (and Facebook) to realize they couldn't pander to trump's hate anymore.

What is happening now with shutting down trump's main pipeline to his rabid fanbase are arguments from trump's still-pandering Republican allies whining about how Twitter's shutdown is a threat to Free Speech. No, it is not.

This is about Hate Speech. This is about speech designed to enrage others and drive them to madness and violence. We've watched that Hate Speech roll out and infest our national psyche. We've just seen the results of all that Hate: Our nation's Capitol raided and vandalized, rioters and now a police officer dead from the violence, our global prestige degraded by trump's words (and the deeds he's driven others to commit in his "honor").

Words have power. It's one of the few things trump - the eternal lying bullshitter, the constantly grifting con artist - understands all too well. It's a power he's used to drive this nation apart.

And while trump's been cut off from his Twitter feed, he will find a way to keep lashing out at the fate that awaits him on January 20, 2021.

Gods help us, how far into madness and the void trump's Hate will drive us.

Just the Facts Jack In This Age of trumpian Bull

One of the more frustrating things about The Darkest Timeline has been how trump would take to his Twitter account to post and retweet nonfactual statements, wild accusations, and straight-up lies.

However over the past week or so, trump has gone overboard pushing a discredited conspiracy theory about former Congresscritter-turned-MSNBC-talking-head Joe Scarborough, a story involving a staff worker who died at a district office back in 2001. It's gotten so bad that the woman's widower sent formal letters to Twitter and the press begging for the social media outfit to use its authority to delete the offending tweet(s).

The public outcry against trump's abuse of Twitter's code of conduct had been an ongoing protest ever since 2017 - no previous President Loser of the Popular Vote has been so vulgar towards the general population the way trump has - but this moment seemed to have crossed a line even for the notoriously lax Twitter bosses.

The next time trump went to Tweet an outrageous falsehood - about the legitimacy of vote-by-mail - Twitter took the extraordinary step of adding a footnote that basically accused the Tweet (and trump) of being wrong. Let's refer to Gilad Edelman at Wired for the rest:

What prompted Twitter to finally break the seal was a two-tweet tirade about the supposed dangers of expanding vote-by-mail during the coronavirus pandemic...

Later that evening, Twitter added a note to the bottom of the tweet: a big exclamation mark and a message reading “Get the facts about mail-in ballots,” which linked to a Twitter Moment fact-check. “Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud,” read the bold heading. Beneath it came some bullet points on vote-by-mail, followed by a curated feed of tweets picking apart Trump’s various recent claims about it...

The Twitter spokesperson said that flagging Trump’s vote-by-mail tweet was the debut of a similar policy to protect “civic integrity” by correcting false information about voting or the census. Twitter didn’t say so, but it surely helped that this particular tweet contained one nugget of rock-solid, certifiably false information: the claim that California was sending ballots to “anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there.” In fact, ballots are going only to registered voters...

This is, for the most part, the first time trump has been contradicted in real-time pretty much to his face (nearly every other countering in the media has been indirectly through op-ed articles and pundit shows).

It's telling that Twitter still hasn't confronted trump on the personal attacks he's done on their service, which are offensive and wrong and deserve him getting his account suspended (AKA Twitter Jail). Still, any little bit helps... Because trump's response to getting punched back has been to lash out in full meltdown. Via Charlotte Klein at Vanity Fair:

Trump threatened to regulate or shut down social media companies the day after being fact-checked by Twitter. “Republicans feel that social media platforms totally silence conservatives voices,” the president wrote in a post on Wednesday. “We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen.”

Funny thing about the First Amendment, it's not on trump's side here:

The president, notes the Associated Press, does not have the power to “unilaterally regulate or close the companies, which would require action by Congress or the Federal Communications Commission,” and Trump’s call to expand regulation on such tech giants “appeared to fly in the face of long-held conservative principles on deregulation...”

Anything trump tries to do to punish Twitter will likely lead to lawsuits taking years to resolve, by which time trump could be out of office (and fleeing for a country without extradition).

The facts, obviously, aren't going to slow trump down on this. he's threatening to issue an Executive Order (remember when Republicans attacked Obama for his EOs?) to compel Twitter and other social media outlets - Facebook and YouTube, both services facing increasing pressure to police their websites for disinformation over COVID-19 and other conspiracy nutcase theories - to bend to his will. trump doesn't have the legal standing but he has the ego of the bully to make life harder for the companies attempting to curtail his - and his cronies' - ongoing efforts to gaslight the world.

But the facts should matter. And these social media sites have an obligation, not only to the First Amendment but also to the common interest of properly informing the public. Forcing trump to confront his falsehoods in real-time, cutting off the Russian bots trying to overwhelm our attention with disinfo, and making sure Americans have the correct facts ought to be their agenda here on out.

Because as we've seen with three years of trump's gaslighting, lies and disinformation kills.

The Divisive Racist In Chief

Yeah so today - which was the day trump wanted his massive ICE roundup of families and dark-skinned folks - the Loser of the Popular Vote took to his Twitter account to mock fellow Americans yet again. To link to Yoni Appelbaum at the Atlantic:

This morning, the president of the United States decided to share his thoughts with the American people:

So interesting to see “Progressive” Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!

It’s not clear to whom the president thought he was referring. There are 10 naturalized American citizens in the House, five of them Democratic women, but few of Donald Trump’s favorite targets number among them. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, was born in the Bronx, Rashida Tlaib in Detroit, and Ayanna Pressley in Cincinnati. And irrespective of their origins, every single member of Congress is as American as democratic dissent...

When first read, trump's tweeted taunts are a variation of a standard racist remark offered by Whites towards other Americans who just happen to be Black or Latino or Asian or Arab: "Go Back to X" where X equals "Africa" or "China" or "Japan" or "Mexico" or "Bumfuckistan" or whatever place the racist White didn't care to learn from geography class. It's an insult as old as slavery itself, as old as the anti-Chinese Exclusion Acts of the late 19th Century, as old as this weekend when trump and his goons sought to round up every Latino to ship off to Guatemala even if they were U.S. citizens...

It's a not-at-all-subtle signal from the racist Eurowhite Trash saying it that they don't believe the Black/Asian/Latino/Arab person is a true American. It's an open sign of racist disgust focused on the color of skin or the accented voice or any other little thing that makes the Eurowhite Trash feel the need to make the target of their hate run away in tears or terror.

That's all trump is good for, by the way. Being a racist insult machine eager to drop such bombs in order to get other White-Americans to cheer him on. Even though such vicious behavior is un-Christian - go read Ephesians 2:19 - and violates the diversity our immigrant-based national identity represents.

All trump is getting with his Morning Hatefest is public recognition that he's racist. Again. One more exclamation mark in the history books about how this... orange-toned life form is perhaps the worst human being to sit in the Oval Office since Andrew Johnson.

To the 62 million who knowingly, willingly voted for this Shitgibbon #RacistInChief... there will be a reckoning for the hatred you've signed on for. This shit won't last. And every last American you've insulted is going to remember your eagerness to divide our nation.

If only shame actually mattered to you deplorable bastards.

The Fredo-In-Chief Wants You To Know He's Smaht Not Dumb Like Everybody Says

I know a guy...walks into a bank with a bottle, tells everybody it's nitroglycerin. He scores some cash off of the teller. On his way out, he drops the bottle. It cracks on the floor. He slips in it. He smacks up his head. They get him. The nitroglycerin was canola oil. I know more fucked-up bank robbers than ones that know what they're doing. I doubt one in ten could tell you where the dye pack is. Most bank robbers are fucking morons. 

-- Jack Foley, from Out of Sight

(And yes, that's not a typo in the headline: it's common practice to spell out the accent used when quoting a movie, and that's how the late great John Cazale said it)

We never accused donald j. trump of being intelligent, or smart. Clever, probably, you don't get to figure out how to con people out millions of dollars if you didn't have some skill set. Devious always, and bullying and short-sighted that's pretty fucking obvious.

But as you look more and more at this criminal organization known as the trump Empire, the more you see a mafia-esque group of wannabes who all play at being Michael Corleone but all turn out to be an army of Fredos. It becomes less "How did these morans trick so many people into voting for them?" and more "No wonder they got help from Russia to cheat their way into the White House."

Because that's where the Fredo-in-Chief trump is going with his ongoing ragefest on Twitter to cover up his crimes. Just this morning, in fact, link provided to Digby's Hullabaloo site:

Fake News reporting, a complete fabrication, that I am concerned about the meeting my wonderful son, Donald, had in Trump Tower. This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics - and it went nowhere. I did not know about it!
8:35 AM - Aug 5, 2018

Where trump gets a few things wrong:

1) he'd already tried to cover for that June 2016 meeting between donald junior and Russians, meaning that he's either lied then or lying now. Given this is trump, it's likely both.
2) trump's claim that the meeting was "totally legal" and "done all the time in politics" conflict with what's already been revealed about that meeting.
3) The "totally legal" argument goes against the US Code 52 s.30121: It shall be unlawful for—
(1) a foreign national, directly or indirectly, to make—
(A) a contribution or donation of money or other thing of value, or to make an express or implied promise to make a contribution or donation, in connection with a Federal, State, or local election;
(B) a contribution or donation to a committee of a political party; or
(C) an expenditure, independent expenditure, or disbursement for an electioneering communication (within the meaning of section 30104(f)(3) of this title); or
(2) a person to solicit, accept, or receive a contribution or donation described in subparagraph (A) or (B) of paragraph (1) from a foreign national...

4) Where the "Other thing of value" applies to Russia claiming they have "dirt" on Hillary Clinton that trump and the Republicans could use to disrupt the 2016 elections in their favor. The "Solicit, Accept, or Receive" comes into play from the fact that donald trump junior was so very eager to get that dirt and arranged that meeting.

This should be a very simple rule: DO NOT WORK WITH FOREIGN NATIONS OR TAKE ANY FOREIGN MONEY WHEN RUNNING AN ELECTION CAMPAIGN. Yet there trump is, arguing that it's all legal and that his ignorance of the law is a defense.

One of the first things they taught me in High School Latin was this phrase: Ignorantia juris non excusat. Ignorance of the Law is No Excuse. But then again I doubt trump studied Latin, or even remembered what he failed to learn in High School.

This is trump, trying to get ahead of the scandal where Mueller is getting ever closer to tying trump's campaign - especially his own son - to the Russians already charged by Mueller of interfering/hacking the elections. But this is also trump, throwing his own son under the bus by making it so very clear that what junior did violated the US Code I quoted above.

It takes a certain level of stupidity to think that confessing to shit you've done can somehow be accepted or ignored, that your own argument of "it wasn't illegal!" would somehow sway the prosecutors about to put the hammer down on you. The smart move is to separate yourself from the evidence as much as possible and keep your own damn mouth shut.

Here's proof number 9718 that trump got help from Russia to steal the election. He doesn't have enough brain cells to even realize the smart play is to shut up.

Break out the Popcorn GIFs, this coming week is gonna be a doozy. 

Quick Note: Are We Effed Yet? Are We Effed Yet? Are We Effed Yet?

Follow the hashtag #TreasonSummit online via the Intertubes to find out if trump has surrendered the United States without a shot in person to Putin.

We may not know until later just how bad the damage is. Maybe when trump decides on issuing an Article 13 against NATO. Right now everything is just guesswork and dread.

Update 3:29 PM: OHHHHHHHHH WE ARE FUCKING EFFED NOW.

She's REALLY Not Going to be Into Trump At All, Late Election Cycle Version

So I wake up this morning, actually in the mood to rage about a moronic Congress - just blogged about it a second ago - and I immediately find myself conflicted about what to write, because Trump - being the narcissistic monster that he is - went and Tweeted a series of delightful anecdotal meanderings about the nature of the cosmos ahem a series of angry twitterbombs about the women ruining his brand name:

I didn't actually see his Tweets, as I have him blocked, but I saw the responses from those I follow so I tracked back and saw these missives. And, yes, I headdesked.

My immediate response, via Twitter as well:

You might ask, "well what is the difference between a Dick and an Asshole?" I'll share a link that kinda explains it quickly, and concur by pointing out that a Dick is someone who intentionally - sometimes violently, but always maliciously - acts in a demeaning way towards others while an Asshole is a self-centered self-serving jerk.

It's rare to find a person who can be both at the same time, so in this regard this is a moment that should be long remembered. Just not fondly, because Trump is doing this in the worst way possible.

Today was the culmination of the fallout from last Monday's debate, when Hillary pummeled Trump on a lot of points and ended up hitting him with a broadside about his flagrant misogyny when it comes to women who work for him. She brought up one of the models who worked for him Miss Universe 1996 - the year he took over that pageant - Alicia Machado and how he went out of his way to insult her physique: Trump deemed her too fat and shamed her into making public displays of exercise. Trump objected to Hillary's attack and tried to deflect it by stammering over his other public fights with women, but didn't really have a coherent argument.

What happened next was avoidable to anyone who understands politics. Hillary bringing up Trump's horrid mistreatment of Machado - this is fat? She's gorgeous - was a clear trap to make Trump angry enough to retaliate. It's a common tactic in campaigning - Trump needled his Primary opponents much the same way - well back to even before the days of LBJ's mudslinging: "Make the other sonofabitch deny it." The smart move is to ignore it, offer a correction, and move on.

Trump did worse than deny it: He doubled down. His follow-up interviews on Fox Not-News and elsewhere had him praising himself for being rude and insulting to his Miss Universe, that he did a good thing fat-shaming her like that, and besides she was still ugly and worthless to boot. And now he's gone full misogynist, attacking her for perceived sexual dalliances - the so-called Sex Tape is her rolling under bedsheets with a guy on a reality show and there's nothing explicit, I swear certain Disney movies are more kinky oh whoops I really shouldn't say THAT - as though slut-shaming her will drive from the public stage.

As David A. Graham puts it:

Then there’s the Machado tweets. Four days after Trump debate Clinton, he is still consumed by his anger at a woman who was Miss Universe in the 1990s. Or, to put that in demographic terms, Trump is still  insulting a Latina woman and calling attention to the fact that he called her fat with just a month left until an election, when he trails Clinton badly among Latinas and women. And he’s doing so at the cost of attacking his opponent, at a time when she is seeing a rebound in the polls.

Trump doesn't really get it when it comes to women. Considering how many men among his Inner Circle - Newt, Ailes, Giuliani, all of them thrice-married twice-divorced hypocrites of sexual stupidity - also don't get it, this is going to make this the nasty part of the final leg of the campaign.

Trump's outrage is fueled by a spoiled, narcissistic view of women as Objects, as pretty things that need to dangle from him to make himself more attractive as an (wannabe) Alpha Male. The second a wife no longer appeals to him, she's out the door (often in a humiliating fashion). He has a need to stand surrounded by beautiful women - his obsession with models and beauty pageants - as a means of showing off his success. His view of Machado as "fat" was his anger at "her" perceived failing to match "his" physical ideal, which drove his desire to punish her with public humiliation and consistent scorn.

His tweets to call on Republicans - many of them self-described Christian moralists - to hunt down "sex tapes" so he can embarrass his ex-model victim is both ironic and clueless.

And if Trump thinks he can set himself up now to attack Hillary - not herself, but husband Bill's sexual history - he's ignoring two things. One: Hillary's already prepared for that, she had to knowing full well - hello, Vast Right Wing Conspiracy media! - this storm would come. Two: Hillary AND Bill already weathered this same storm back in the 1990s... and they came out more popular than their attackers. A majority of Americans saw the Republicans going after Bill over the Lewinsky affair as hypocritical witch-hunters who overplayed their hand: This is key, a majority of women sympathized with Hillary and forgave her stance aside her unfaithful husband because many of them saw themselves in her place.

There may be polls showing women may not fully trust or support Hillary, but the numbers are high enough to hint she's winning that bloc. There's more than enough stories online about how other women - suffering in the slights of Glass Ceilings and mansplaining and Gods help us another hundred cuts of Male Ego - recognize Hillary for what she represents: the first sledgehammer to that Glass Ceiling.

I've said it before and will say it again: The real scandal of the Republicans' fall from power this decade is how they've squandered and demeaned women voters into abandoning them. For all the talk about the ethnic votes - how the GOP lost Blacks entirely to the Democrats, and this election cycle they're about to lose Latinos and Asians for good - it's been the ebb in the gender vote that will kill the Republicans.

This is what I said last time:

Here's a nasty little secret about our electoral system... there are more women voters (76 million) than men (66 million). Pissing off the majority of voters that participate in the general election is not a sound campaign strategy. And if there's any issue that can unite women, it's being treated like dirt by a misogynist bastard.

That's Trump: Being the misogynist bastard. Going out of his way to treat women like dirt, and crowing about it.

If women vote at the same percentage they hate Trump - around 70 percent - that's 53 million votes for Hillary (or maybe Stein or Johnson, but let's face it most of that's going for Hillary) right off the bat. Getting 98 percent of the Black vote or 80 percent of the Latino vote - oh man, the Cuba story has to wait for another blog article - or 60 percent of the College-Educated White vote would be nice and pad out the numbers for Democrats. But we're talking about the kind of votes that will cut away from any Republican ballot.

And it should. The last series of election cycles since 2008 - including midterms - has shown an increasingly hostile Republican agenda towards women (not just abortion, other issues that matter to them like education, wages, and child care). Remember Todd Akin, and the Republican Party's overall inability to treat rape as the serious crime it is? Remember how Rush Limbaugh tried to slut-shame Sandra Fluke, and ended up costing his radio network billions in lost ad revenue? This has all been building up, and Trump is adding on a shit-ton of bricks (enough to build a you-know-what) to make things worse.

I hope to God that She is merciful enough to have only 79 percent of all women voters side with Hillary this November. It will probably win for the Democrats every state except Wyoming... maybe Alabama.

P.S.: Get the vote out, Democrats. This election matters. 

The Gravity of the Situation

(Update: Thanks as always for the link, Infidel!)

So last night was the debate. I was planning on going to a watch party but I came down with the sore throat bug (tis the season) and forced myself to stay home and livetweet #Gotham before livetweeting #debatenight

Gonna see if I can share some of my tweets:

well you can see who liked THIS one.

Cough. Excuse me, head cold. More tweets from last night:

It's enough to make a man sick. Twice.

Lemme just share from Balloon Juice about last night:

If you didn’t watch last night, rest assured: Hillary did a fine job, and Donald Trump… repeated all his Greatest Hits from the Rallies bits. He didn’t lose a single member of his devoted “base”, but he sniffled, lied, talked over the woman on the stage, claimed that America is a job-leaking hellhole which every filthy brown terrorist can’t wait to invade, lied some more, contradicted the African-American moderator (while lying), sniffled, called President Obama “your president”, took credit for “settling” the birtherism issue, and by every metric and “optic” looked like a coked-up, aging con artist in a bad suit rambling about “the nuclear” and “the cyber”...

Trump's own physical appearance became a liability. The tweets about his constant sniffling - which brought up jokes about his being sick, or else jokes about cocaine being a hell of a drug, and both - and his wilting on-stage became brutal and unavoidable. Per Drezner at the Washington Post:

The most interesting thing, however, was that as the debate went along, Clinton got stronger and Trump got weaker. A look at the debate transcript suggests that Trump’s answers got more rambling and more incoherent toward the end of the debate. Clinton remained her steady self...

...By the end of the debate, after 95 minutes of petulance, Trump claimed that he had a great temperament. The audience spontaneously laughed in response.

Presidential debates are tough, but being the president is tougher. And my main takeaway from tonight’s debate is that Donald Trump doesn’t have the stamina to last four years as America’s commander in chief. Or, as Clinton put it: “I think — I think — I think Donald just criticized me for preparing for this debate. And, yes, I did. And you know what else I prepared for? I prepared to be President. And I think that’s a good thing.”

Zing!

As Drezner notes: Can you picture Trump lasting four years in the White House? Not just in terms of stamina but in terms of focus and dedication to the job. He's all over the place, uncontrollable and undisciplined. Bush "Strategery" the Lesser handled himself better at these final-round debates, and that's saying something.

There was the expectation that because of the weak Republican primaries - where Trump's opponents were terrified to whack at him, leaving him unbruised - he'd flail and fail at a debate where his opponent - Hi, Madam President! - would actually punch back. And while Hillary did land a few blows, the real shocking thing is that a lot of Trump's wounds were self-inflicted. His own appearance defeated him (which begs the possibility he's going to refuse to show up to the next two he's supposed to do).

Of course, the big takeaway from last night is... that this will not greatly affect the polling or the amount of support Trump is getting from his GOP base. The horror that at the very least Trump is getting 40 percent of the vote will not go away (not unless he eats a live baby on-stage or something). The best to hope for is that the remnants of the Undecideds or the moderate Indy voters are now - hopefully and finally - terrified of Trump and will boost Hillary over 45-50 percent and in enough swing states to ensure an Electoral College stomping.

Hope hope hope.

What should happen here is a switch in the Narrative that the Beltway prides itself on: That is, that the Beltway insiders are "always right" and plugged-in to the "real power-brokers" with real news. There may still be a push for "both sides!" false equivalence to force their ongoing lust for a horse race, but we should see a major shift in the tone among the media elites towards highlighting the sins, flaws, and outright lies of Trump and his handlers.

But will that all happen?

Here's where my hope turns to despair. For more than a year we've seen Trump campaign exactly in this manner: Shameless, reckless, lying, self-serving, arrogant, noisy, inhuman, insane. Everything he did last night was a greatest hits version of every horror Trump displayed on the campaign trail... and in all those previous disasters, Trump's numbers went up. He kept moving, he kept lying, he kept winning in the worst ways. That shamelessness is key: Most other politicians would never sink to the levels Trump does, because they are actually concerned about their reputation and their futures. Trump doesn't care: He believes his reputation is flawless - hint: it's not - and his soul unblemished, so he continues to behave this way because nobody stops him and because too many people buy into his con game.

The normal dynamics of an election cycle tells us that what happened to Trump tonight would sink any campaign. The law of gravity regarding any single gaffe requires that Trump sinks below his support and fades into zero. But that has not happened to him yet: And after all of the failures and insults and chaos, Trump keeps gaining ground he should not gain. I've seriously begun worrying that either the polls are rigged or that there really are that many clueless voters buying into Trump's scam.

It would be pretty to think that Trump sinks to 33 percent support by the end of the week, and that Hillary regains solid leads in swing states like Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio, and that even Georgia and Missouri and Arizona become Leans Blue with some happy relief on my part.

But does political gravity work the way it used to?

Mama Wartenberg's Traditional Tasty Taco Truck

"If you don't do something about it, you're gonna have taco trucks on every corner!" - "Latinos for Trump" co-founder Marco Gutierrez on MSNBC 9/1/2016

THIS MIGHT WORK.

"Everybody gets a taco truck!" - Oliver Willis

Just think of the economic benefits of having taco trucks on every corner! No, this is serious! Food truck service is actually a smart investment in the right markets!

Hell, give me the seed money right now! Lemme go start my own taco truck service!

And all I gotta do is use Mama Wartenberg's excellent Mexican-German recipes to serve up the BEST TACOS IN CENTRAL FLORIDA!

Take the finest taco tortilla shells made from pure Iowa corn.

Grill the pulled pork doused in peppers and the family chili sauce.

Layer it with lettuce onion tomato and the finest Cheddar and Monterey Jack cheeses.

Topped with the purest sour cream shipped from the farms of Bavaria.

We can sell three tacos for $5.99 plus drink!

Who wants in on this franchise, baby!

TACOS FOR EVERYONE!

P.S. be wary of any Trump Taco Trucks in your neighborhood. They won't serve the best tacos, not ever.