That’s a pretty great site!

I do agree that he is incredibly detached from reality and probably overestimates his support, but I don’t think that’s a factor in what he’s doing to destroy/fleece the government. I think he overestimated the competency of himself and the kids he’s having do all the coding work.

I found it. It was a pellet grill, not a smoker, from Trager Grills. They’re a pretty big and reputable company. And they’re an American company, so it’s not even like they didn’t know it was a holiday in the US.

I don’t agree.

These fascists are all following the political ideology and strategies laid out by Curtis Yarvin under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. He’s been in the orbit of people like Peter Thiel for 10+ years and has been very influential among the tech oligarch crowd.

His vision centers around creating a tech-oriented monarchy for America. At the top would be the president who would operate more like the Chairman of the Board in a corporate structure. Rather than governing on a day-to-day basis, this President/King would appoint a CEO to oversee the actual management of government. That’s the role Musk has taken on.

Trump appoints Musk to do the actual running of the country to accomplish what Trump wants accomplished while letting Trump seem above the fray (at least that’s the intention, Trump is too incompetent to actually stay above the fray). Musk isn’t a red herring. He’s not diverting from anything. He’s just the guy doing the job so Trump can go golf all day.

I think the only good messaging strategy they had the entire campaign was calling Republicans “weird”, and that got shutdown after like 2 weeks. Whoever killed that should be driven out of politics forever.

Obama was only voted into office because he is an extremely charismatic and charming person.

I think it had more to do with the conditions at the time. He was one of the few politicians with a national following from either party who had always vocally opposed the Iraq War. His chief opponent in the Democratic Primary was Hilary Clinton, who had voted for the invasion in 2003 even though she was opposed to the war by 2008. On the Republican side, McCain was still saying in 2008 that his vote to invade was a good decision and that he’d do it again.

It’s hard to remember now, but the Iraq War was a MASSIVE issue in the primaries and early general election in 2008. The country was almost unanimously opposed to it by that point, including Republican voters. W Bush was massively unpopular, and that was dragging down the entire GOP. Then the Great Recession hit and Bush/the GOP took the entire blame since they’d he’d been President for 8 years and they’d held the majority in both houses of Congress for most of the Bush presidency.

By that point, a corpse with a (D) next to their name could have defeated McCain. Obama is absolutely incredibly charismatic and a once-in-a-generation political mind. But 2008 was also a perfect storm of factors against the Republican Party. There was virtually no way a Democrat could lose that election.

I remember a few years ago there was some super popular brand of smoker (like to cook food) that had an internet connection. On Thanksgiving Day they pushed out a software update that made the smoker unsuable to several hours. I saw tons of posts of people who were planning to cook their Thanksgiving turkey in their smoker but couldn’t use it because it was undergoing a system update.

Sure, most of my clocks auto set, but not everything does. I had to manually set the clock on my stove, coffee pot, microwave, etc.

I dunno. They successfully ignored the 14th Amendment, which banned him from serving the term he’s currently serving.

My guess is that he’s going to run. Some Democratically-controlled state is going to try to ban him from the ballot. It’ll get challenged to the SCOTUS and they’ll rule he’s allowed to appear unless Congress rules he’s ineligible under the 22nd Amendment. Congress will do nothing and he’ll be allowed to run again.