Their loss, our gain.

Meta today began removing ads from attorneys who were seeking clients that claim to have been harmed by social media

. . . Thereby proving the absolute ease and facility with which content can be rapidly identified and removed when that content removal serves the corporation, and thereby actively helping to prove the plaintiffs’ cases for them.

Now that’s meta.

The stupidity comes from trying to threaten a religious figurehead of a church of 1 billion people with assassination in our media enstrangled world when the president can’t even handle the bad polling from gas prices going up.

I have no doubt some of his inner circle would gladly murder the pope to make a point, but their evil is also grossly incompetent.

This, exactly. I’m not even a believer, but I know the history very well, and I’d readily bet on a group that has lasted in its current form for roughly a thousand years (see note below) and has something like 1.3 billion adherents, over a diaper-wearing kiddie-raping bully that hasn’t even made 80 and is firing his own cabinet members during the most stupid war he could ever have started while he systematically works to destroy his own country. They believe in an unconquerable god and heavenly king; Trump believes he is god and wants to be a king. In a war of ideas with a roomful of religious historians (aka Jesuits) Trump’s bullies are not winning jack shit.

Whoever mentioned Avignon meant it as a threat, but for anyone who knows history – and these cardinals certainly do – in 2000 years of Christianity, for the Catholics Avignon was a blip in time that the Church overcame and was made stronger by. Knowing some historically-minded Catholics (and Eastern Orthodox, too!) and how into the history they really, really are, the mention of Avignon is not nearly as much of a threat to the Pope as it is a reminder of the supremacy of the church throughout the ages, and how challengers come and go but the Church remains.

The cardinals really do think like this; this is not an exaggeration. That DoD fool only thought he was lecturing the cardinal, lol. I’ve been personally witness to sincere, hours-long religious arguments over historical concepts like apostolic succession (though not with cardinals, lol), and compared to that Avignon wasn’t even a hiccup. I’d put money on all those cardinals catching each other’s eyes and smirking when the Americans weren’t looking, because every cardinal in that room was thinking about papal history in the long term: in that context, the DoD rep was simply making an ass of himself.

Let’s see Polymarket take this one up. Pope v. Trump: who wins? It’s a no-brainer. I’ll take the guy in the white dress.

Note: I’m going with the Great Schism of 1054; others might calculate it differently

Too old and useless to go full Alexander VI, but yeah.

Also, unless the meeting is on your own turf, how do you diplomatically refuse to sit on a couch that was there with JD before you got there? I don’t think pope training covers this.

Especially in the Oval Office: chances are non-zero that any seat you might take in the room has had either diaper breach, Crown Prince Couchfucker after hours, or both.

A guy who has to dress in white for the job has to think about these things, because if he sits on the wrong couch in the white robe, when he stands up again now it’s HIS story. So in the end it’s gotta be either “I’ll just stand, thanks,” or like you said, not go at all.

She’s an evil Zio neolib like the rest of the Democratic Party. Crocodile tears

That’s literally MAGA speak with different slurs, lol

Hitler wanted a Triumphbogen, a triumphal arch, twice the size of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

Triumphbogen

That’s just inadvertently hilarious. Especially because the entire article is an obvious reference to Trump’s own aspirations to the same gaudy spray-gilded trailer-palace chic.

So did I: this is supposed to be a representational democracy, with representatives picked locally, with elections held by each state, to represent their individual constituents at every level of government, near or distant.

If the people want a president gone, their representatives are supposed to be doing that for them. That is their specific job. Or to put it another way, if Congress were actually doing what they were elected and constitutionally empowered to do, there would be zero No Kings protests, because they’d have already used their powers to impeach.

The check on the elected representatives is that they are supposed to be disposable when bad, swapped out for better representatives through elections, which is part of why their term length is relatively short.

It used to work.

Truth. Aileen Cannon is so thoroughly corrupt and dedicated to covering up Trump’s crimes that her gag order on Jack Smith meant he could not even describe the contents of his report to Congress under subpoena in a deposition.

Seems like more people should be upset about this, but I guess we’ve all given up on democracy.

You, maybe. Certainly nowhere near ALL. I was out there on Saturday. It’s FAR from over.

They did intend the people to have both the right and the power to forcibly remove bad presidents: it’s been written into Article I since the beginning.

My personal take is that the framers of the Constitution never expected Congress to legislate themselves out of power, which is why many of the checks on executive power lie in their hands. But that is exactly what they’ve done.

I don’t think these majority Face Eating Party members have actually considered the fact that they’ve fucked themselves as much as they’ve fucked anyone else. But they’ll figure it out too, once they realize a king can appoint his own Congress: he doesn’t actually need them anymore either.

Rules of the comm say you have to use the exact title of the article. I had taken that off and then realized it had to stay if the post was to remain up.

Yeah, I think it’s safe to say that no one wants to watch an orange pustule erupt.

Six hour old account with post history of less than a single day insists year old account with plenty of Iranian content isn’t actually posting from Iran.

Posting the same lie twice doesn’t make it true, it just makes you a repetitive liar. So I’m just gonna block you now and limit my exposure to what I’ve already seen. Got enough misinformation coming at me already without your own ongoing personal amateur hour shit.

I still can’t understand why you need to register to vote? I mean, is that really democracy?

I literally do not understand what this question is trying to say, unless it is coming from a profound misunderstanding of what registering to vote actually means.

In the US, all elections are run by the individual states, across a land mass that is bigger than western Europe, and smaller only than Russia or China, and our voting process goes back to the late 18th century. This process actually worked really well for over two hundred years. It is only with the advent of electronic voting in the 1990s that there has been any real problem with our systems.

But regardless, both back in the 1700s and now, registering to vote in the US is simply a matter of providing your identity and address of residence to your state’s electoral board in accordance with that state’s laws. In return your constitutional right to vote in elections is affirmed by your state, again in accordance with that state’s processes, so that when you show up to vote your vote is properly validated and counted.

So given that understanding, what does registering to vote have to do with any system of government?

What’s not democratic about being affirmed as a lawful voter by the state where you reside, in a country where it is impossible to know all your neighbors by sight and where there even now are vast stretches of rural land that have few to no inhabitants?

It also means that you, as a voter, have zero LOCAL recourse to get yourself added back on to the allowed list, should you ever find you have been kicked off it. And that is by design.

In most (all? I don’t know) states, if there is any problem with your registration or ID at the polling place you are allowed to submit a provisional ballot, which is then counted after the problem is resolved, or discarded if it is not.

But with a federal – physically controlled in Washington, DC – list of allowed voters they can kick whoever they want off the voter rolls, whenever they want, for any reason they want or even no reason at all, and have that be the final word.

EVERYONE is on the disallowed voter list until and unless specifically added, by unnamed operators, in some completely opaque process, answerable to either no one at all, or just to some rubber-stamping kangaroo court in DC.

By contrast, the framers of the Constitution very specifically and deliberately left all election matters to the states, because they never wanted that concentration of power in the federal. Coming out of a very out of touch and physically distant monarchy they wanted people to never be too far from the mechanics of their own elections, so they very carefully wrote it the way they did.

And here we are.

Pretty sure this is gonna be a literal whitelist, as in white voters.

This is very clearly what they wanted all those state voter rolls for.

Pretty much, but as others have pointed out elsewhere, it’s difficult for him to rig the midterms for a number of reasons. It is entirely possible that both the House and the Senate will lose their majorities, even with all these obvious efforts to rig and cheat.

No great loss: at best, Mediaite only ever quotes other reporting. At worst, it’s like the above, which is a simple juxtaposition of “here’s what he said on TruthSocial plus what happened just after” so it’s not even a decent summarize and regurge.

Whenever I see Mediaite, I only ever open it to get the links to the real reporting they’re cribbing. This one didn’t even have that. I still upvote for visibility, but for real content anywhere else is usually better.

The Post and Courier article for anyone interested (paywalled):
Three years on Hilton Head leave trail of mysteries in alleged Jeffrey Epstein affair – March 29, 2026

Archive.world link (I could not find another one that actually had the article content):
https://archive.ph/tsDog

The Substack reporter, Ellie Leonard, who dug it up:
https://substack.com/@redpencilscript/note/c-227060790

This is really good. Thank you for taking the time to write it.