Thursday, February 27, 2025

The Snapshot

 Thursday, February 27, 2025.  Tabitha reminds "We did not have to be here It did not have to be this way,"  MAGA creeps in Congress don't want truth to come out in hearings, Aline Musk continues to lie, and much more.


Lets start with TABITHASPEAKS.


There were two choices in the fall of 2024: Kamala Harris or Convicted Felon Donald Chump.  There was no excuse then and there's no excuse now.  DSA launched their plan to attack Kamala and depress turnout and they got away with it because they control so much of the media.  If you're new to the topic, you can refer to these two pieces: "2024: The Year of Betrayal From Inside The Left." and "Media: How Amy Goodman harmed immigrants and helped elect Chump."


In 2028, if they try to start this same rat f**kery, we need to shut id down immediately.  Dropping back to 2023, Alex Seitz-Wald (NBC NEWS) reported:


At the DSA’s national convention in Chicago earlier this month, questions about whether the group should form an independent political party and how vigorously it should discipline members in elective office were front-and-center, with strong opinions on both sides.

But a resolution for a full “clean break” with the Democratic Party fell short and a Rhode Island DSA member who ran for the national political committee on an anti-Democratic Party platform did not succeed.

Renée Paradis, a member of the party's National Political Committee said opinion inside the DSA ranges widely, including those who want the group to be more active inside the Democratic Party.

But the consensus coming out of the convention, she said, remains that DSA should keep running candidates in Democratic primaries while building its own outside campaign infrastructure.

They have to pose as Democrats to win.  Socialism isn't going to carry them  into office in most districts.  So they have to lie.  And they lie about who they are in their books they write about each other -- their bad books that are nothing but a circle jerks --  and they have this whole deception that they pull.  If you're a Democrat and they start doing this in 2028, you need to be vocal and you need to call them out.  You need to point out that they aren't Democrats.  


One of the funniest things in watching 'brave' voices call out Ana of THE YOUNG TURKS is watching the people shy from noting that she was DSA.  


That's typical DSA.  I have friends in DSA but I am not DSA because that crap has always happened -- even with their predecessor.  They're more radical than thou and they want to tear down the system and then they get frustrated and they do their move to the right. 


As a DSA member, Ana got to host JACOBIN's podcast.  Why are we saying, 'She went from left over to MAGA"?  She went from Socialist over to MAGA.


They both want to tear down the system.  It's not that big of a lep and far too many DSAs have made that leap over the years.  


Kyle Kulinski is DSA.  He and Cenk came up with Justice "Democrats" because they knew Justice Socialists wouldn't work.  


Kyle seems like a caring person.  He can sometimes make a highly astute call.  


But we don't highlight anymore.  


If you're a Socialist trying to pass yourself off as a Democrat, after 2024, we can't afford you.


Silly and Billy -- as Cenk calls THE VANGUARD's Zac and Gavin -- look more and more hypocritical with each day.  And more stupid.


What's the latest from the world of domestic Socialism?  Ask Zac and Cody!  Don't ask Zac and Gavin because they're incapable of honesty.  

Doubt it?


"Bernie's back!"


From where?  


He's yacking again.  He's good with words from time to time, he just can't deliver.  The kids don't grasp that.  They don't realized that he was called out for his fake assery for years and years but his excuse was "I can't do this or that because I'm in the House and have to run every two years for re-election."  And a number of us bought that excuse -- I donated to his first Senate run.  He never did anything.  In the Senate nowfor decades and he has nothing to show for it.


But Zac and Gavin are on board!  They are going to vote for him in 2028 for president!!!!!


Do they realize that this is why the look like freaks to the rest of us?


In 2028, Bernie will be 87 years old.  


It's a four year term.  


87 years old.  Older than Joe Biden was when he was president, older than Donald Chump will be when he finishes his four year term.


87 years old.


They are whining constnatly like two little bitches about this age or that age.  Gerry Connolly  shouldn't have been picked to chair that committee, it should have been AOC.  I argued that her.


I remember THE VANGUARD making an argument on that as well: Gerri was too old.

Gerry is 74 years old.  They said he was too old.  But now they're wasting our time on Bernie needs to run in 2028 for president --- when he will be 87?


I can disagree with you and still have some respect for your opinion -- unless you're a hypocrite.


That's why we called out Jimmy Dore to begin with.  And this is also true of Zac and Gavin.


They feel that a primary was stolen.  2016.  Now they are too stupid and too ignorant to go into the 2008 primary and the world only began for them in 2016 as they nursed on Bernie's tits.  But Bernie was done wrong and blah blah blah.  Yet these same people were trashing the Green Party for not making Jesse Ventura thier 2016 presidential nominee.


They insisted the DNC rigged 2016 (and they have a point) but then they want to argue that the Greens should have rigged the primary.  Because that's what they're advocating for.  Jesse wouldn't run for the nomination, other people were delcared candidates for the nomination.  But they're supposed to ignore that and give him the nomination?


Their hypocrisy is only surpassed by their sheer stupidity.


Last week or the week before, they were attacking Jon Stewart and I didn't pay attention, don't really care.  I like Jon as a person, I've known him for years.  I did not like what THE DAILY SHOW did in the lead up to the election -- which included "that's so gay" as a 'joke' and I thought we had all surpassed that nonsense by in the '00s.  They also did a number of 'jokes' that weren't funny and were just Jon both siding it.  Because Jon wants to be seen as fair by both sides.


Guess what, Jon? MAGA isn't fair.  They lie and they lie again.  And if you're not being thretned by them, you're not telling the truth.


I like Jon, I've known him for years.  But as the election approached and he pulled his usual nonsense, we backed away.  I have no intetion of ever highlighting THE DAILY SHOW here again.  It does more ham than good.


A week or two ago, the YOUTUBERs were attacking Jon. Fin, I don't really care.  Except . . .


When real issues could have been addressed we go thte Zac and Codys doing their YOUTUBE segments about how we needed to run Jon Stewart for president.


I'm tired of the stupidity.  I'm so tired of the stupidity.  


I think Senator Patty Murry is one of our best US senators.  I've thought that for some time.  I had a heated argument with an editor as MS.MAGAZINE when they were intentionally overlooking her while covering other Dem 'sheroes.'  Patty's a workhorse who will work on an issue and work on an issue and even if she hits a wall she'll continue working. 


If she runs in 2029 (that would be her next election), I'm not going to be trying to turn out the vote.  She's 74 right now.  And I love Patty.  I think she's done amazing work and think her work as Chair of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee was outstanding.  


But I'm not Zac and Cody.  "BERNIE! BERNIE!  RUN BERNIE!"  


Just grow the hell up.  There's no way in the world that an 87 year old Bernie Sanders needs to walk -- he can't run -- for president.


While they're jerking off to their fantasies and wasting everyone's time, Senator Roger Wicker won't let Senator Elizabeth Warren finish a statement in a hearing.   That 'mean'  Elizabeth Warren wanted a corporation to explain how they ran a hospital into the ground.  Wicker, of course, was present to protect the corporation and to punish the people.  And then you had US House Rep James Comer refusing to let US House Rep Max Frost speak.  What's going on?


MAGA is sinking as is their leader. 

 EJ Montini (ARIZONA REPUBLIC) reports:


Where is co-president Elon Musk and his snotnosed band of pubescent hackers when Donald Trump needs them?

You’d have thought that with all the whiz-bang computer skills Musk claims his nerd bros possess, they’d have been able to weasel their way into the data collection systems of some big-time pollsters and jack up the numbers for the co-commander in chief.

 But I guess not.

Because it ain’t good news.

According to the most recent Gallup poll, Trump is the least popular president in more than 70 years.

Or, as the company put it on its website: “Trump’s job approval rating is 15 points below the historical average for all other elected presidents in mid-February since 1953.”


Here's some reality that Silly & Billy can't make time for.  This is the high water mark.  The first 100 days are the high water mark in terms of popularity for presidents.  And once the rot sets in, public opinion only hardens against them.  

MAGAs can't handle the truth so they shut it down.  Frost was insisting that calling Chump "the grifter in chief" was disrespectful to Chump.  I think Chump's use of porn actress and prostitutes and roll dogging around with the late Jeffrey Epstein and the accusations of assault from all the women pretty much exempt Chump from respect -- as does the 34 felony convictions he received.






Tom Boggioni (RAW STORY) notes of the video segment above:


"I honestly have never in my life seen anything so outrageous as that," she began. "Now, I know there's a lot of things that are outrageous that impact American's lives every day so don't yell at me online. But this is really, really bad. "

"What they're saying is, if you criticize the president of the United States as an elected member of Congress, we will silence you," she continued. "I mean, that's a really good way to lose the midterms."

Addressing the video clip, she added, "I hope that that goes viral, because the truth is, the only thing we know about what Musk and Trump are doing in all these federal agencies is what he puts on his privately owned social media. He owns it privately, I mean, it is something that he bought for billions of dollars, and now he is lifting it up."

"The head of advertising for X has threatened advertisers," she reported, that revelations from a Wall Street Journal article. "If they don't start buying ads, there will be consequences."

"You've got Trump actually selling crypto and you've got Trump who actually is letting people, anybody, buy these, this crypto and enrich him without us knowing who is buying it — how many bad guys are?" she asked. "They are grifters and they are using their positions to make lots of money, and that's a fact. And any member of Congress ought to be able to say it and that just infuriates me at that sleazy Comer for saying that."


Senator Elizabeth Warren's office issued the following regarding yesterday's hearing:

Trump Nominee Seeks A Top Pentagon Leadership Role

Video of Exchange (YouTube)

Washington, D.C. – At a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) questioned Mr. Stephen A. Feinberg, President of Cerberus Capital Management and nominee for Deputy Secretary of Defense, about his troubled private equity history and his qualifications for the job of second-in-command at the Pentagon. 

Senator Warren called out Mr. Feinberg’s involvement in Steward Health Care, a now-bankrupt hospital system, which once owned 31 hospitals nationwide. In Massachusetts specifically, Mr. Feinberg enriched himself and his investors at the expense of the hospitals, sucking out over $700 million while leaving the hospitals understaffed, underresourced, and severely indebted. In part due to his corporate extraction, the system went bankrupt and, two Massachusetts hospitals shut down for good, leaving Massachusetts communities without access to the care they need. 

Mr. Feinberg claimed Steward hospitals were doing “well” at the time Cerberus sold the company. However, “[m]any Steward hospitals were financially struggling as Cerberus began to make its exit in 2020,” according to the Private Equity Stakeholder Project. More importantly, before he left, Mr. Feinberg sold the hospitals’ real estate, cashing out the profits but leaving the hospitals with massive liabilities in the form of years of increasing lease payments for the land they used - a key factor in the hospitals’ 2024 bankruptcy.

Mr. Feinberg claimed he “turned [Steward] around, fixed them, grew them, [and] had a tremendous amount of success.” However, he slashed a full medical center, a primary and specialty care unit, a surgery department, an urgent care department, and a VA Clinic at a Quincy Medical Center, leaving nothing but an emergency room. Additionally, just two years after Cerberus took over Steward, nurses in Massachusetts filed more than 1,000 “unsafe staffing” complaints, a significant increase from previous years.

Transcript: Hearing to Consider the Nomination of Mr. Stephen A. Feinberg to be Deputy Secretary of Defense
U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee 
February 25, 2025 

Senator Elizabeth Warren: So, Mr. Feinberg, you’ve been nominated to be Deputy Secretary of Defense, in charge of DOD’s $850 billion budget. Your main qualification is that you have built one of the world’s largest private equity companies. You’ve spent your entire career honing the private equity tools used to hollow out businesses, from department stores to veterinary practices. And, presumably, those are the skills that you would bring to the Department of Defense. So, I just want to look at how that’s worked.

Let’s start with how you treat people. In Massachusetts, in 2010, your private equity firm bought six non-profit hospitals, turned them into for-profit hospitals called Steward. Ten years later you cashed out, having made a profit a little shy of a billion dollars, and leaving behind a hospital system that was staggered under a load of debt and, four years later, collapsed into bankruptcy.

Now, Mr. Feinberg, when we met in my office, you told me that your private equity outfit made an average 23% annual return each year that you owned our hospitals. If Steward nurses had gotten the same 23% salary increases that your investors effectively got every year, do you know how much they would be paid at the time you sold off your hospitals?  

Mr. Stephen A. Feinberg, nominee for Deputy Secretary of Defense: Well, I do know that in 2010, the hospitals were going under, and we were asked – 

Senator Warren: I’m sorry, Mr. Feinberg, we’re going to have very limited time here and I actually want to spend it on your qualifications to do this job. And it’s about how you treat people. The average nurse in the Steward hospitals at the time you bought them made $85,120. 

At a 23% annual raise, how much money would they be making right now? 

Mr. Feinberg: I’m not going to do the math, but what I could tell you – 

Senator Warren: Okay, I’ll do the math for you. $829,828. Now, of course, the nurses didn’t do that well. During that same period of time, Carney Hospital, one of the hospitals you bought in Massachusetts, raised nurse salaries about 1.5% a year - and that was the best increase across the Steward hospitals that you were running. 

Mr. Feinberg: That’s incorrect. 

Senator Warren: In other words, you seem to think that when it is time to reorganize a business, that equity should get about fifteen times as much return on their investment as the people who actually do the work.

So, let’s take a look at the second issue, and that is maintaining critical functions – 

Mr. Feinberg: Senator, would you like me to respond to Steward? Because a lot of inaccurate statements. 

Senator Warren: We need to make cuts at the Department of Defense, but we also need to maintain our national security.  

Chair Wicker: Mr. Feinberg, she’s entitled to make a speech. 

Mr. Feinberg: I apologize. 

Chair Wicker: She’s entitled to go on and on. 

Senator Warren: So let’s go back to Steward Hospitals. Did you cut fat or cut vital functions?  

Now, Mr. Feinberg, the town of Quincy used to have a full medical center, with primary and specialty care, a surgery department, an urgent care department, and a VA Clinic. That was its basic function. After your private equity company finished with it, what was left?

Mr. Feinberg: Well, when we exited the investment in 2020, the company was doing well –

Senator Warren: I’m asking what was left of the Quincy hospital. When you took it over – 

Chair Wicker: Now, Senator, he’s trying to answer a question. You finally stopped for a breath. 

Senator Warren: Well, that’s what I’m asking – 

Chair Wicker: Do you intend to let him at least have maybe 20, 30 seconds to answer a question? 

Senator Warren: Well, can I have my time back? 

Chair Wicker: Yes, I said you’re entitled to make a speech, but you stopped for – you stopped with a question mark and he started to try to answer the question. 

Senator Warren: All right, what’s the answer to the question? What was left of the Quincy hospital? That was my question. 

Mr. Feinberg: Lots happened after we exited. And there has been mismanagement. We did save – 

Senator Warren: My clarifying question: what was left when you exited? 

Mr. Feinberg: I’m not certain about that – 

Senator Warren: It was an emergency room, and nothing more.  

Mr. Feinberg: But, but, we took those hospitals from collapse in 2010 – we were going to shut it down as the tenth largest employer in Massachusetts, turned them around, fixed them, grew them, had a tremendous amount of success, worked closely with the governor, and the problems with Steward happened after we exited the investment. 

Senator Warren: I am asking about questions as you exited and during the period of time you ran it. Now, of course, a hospital is supposed to provide good quality care—and that takes qualified nurses and other staffers. Mr. Feinberg, for the hospitals that didn’t close down, during the time you ran it, do you know how many “unsafe staffing” complaints were filed?

Mr. Feinberg: I do know the vast majority of problems happened after we left. And by the way, our nurses were among the highest paid in the country.

Senator Warren: Is that a no, that you don't know how much? How many “unsafe staffing” complaints were filed? 

Mr. Feinberg: I don’t know. 

Senator Warren: Well, let me tell you. There were over a thousand filed, that is five times the normal rate in Massachusetts. 

Mr. Feinberg: What year was that? 

Senator Warren: These are the years that you were in control. For the two hospitals – 

Chair Wicker: Senator Warren, perhaps you would like to take another round?

Senator Warren: No, I’d like to just finish. I just have a quote. 

Chair Wicker: Your time is expired, Senator. Your time is expired. 

Senator Warren: I spent a great deal of that time listening to the Chairman telling me how I have to conduct my questions. 

Chair Wicker: The senator's time is expired. 

Senator Warren: Could I just close? 

Chair Wicker: Senator Sullivan. 

Senator Warren: Could I just close, Mr. Chairman? I’d just like to say why I care about this issue. 

Chair Wicker: The senator's time has expired. She can have another round.

###




So what's really going?  MAGA members of Congress are finding it difficult to go home. People are too upset with the lousy job MAGA is doing.  So what they're trying to do in the halls of Congress now is to shut down all truth.  So James Comer, for example, just screams and hisses and thinks back to those teenage years and that cow that really touched him -- in a way no human female ever could.  Mooooo, Comer, moooooo.



For the second time in two weeks, DOGE's "receipts" don't match its claims. 

On Monday, the Department of Government Efficiency released another round of so-called "receipts" — or canceled contracts to show its cost cutting — and posted them on its "wall of receipts." As was the case with the first round, this set, too, contained inaccuracies.               

Despite doubling the number of listed contracts, the updated itemized savings now total $9.6 billion, a sharp drop from the original $16.6 billion in savings DOGE itemized last week. At the same time, DOGE is now claiming total savings of $65 billion — far higher than the amount itemized, and an increase from its earlier claim of $55 billion, much of which has previously been called into question. 

$65 billion is approximately 0.9% of the entire 2024 federal budget of $6.75 trillion. 

DOGE's website claims this higher figure includes savings from contract and lease terminations, renegotiations, grant cancellations, layoffs and other miscellaneous reductions, but DOGE has not supplied documentation for the vast majority of the savings it claims.

In addition, $144.6 million is attributed to real estate savings, but DOGE has provided no supporting details beyond the dollar figure, agency and city, making independent verification difficult.

You get it, right?  DOGE is the most visible of Chump's programs.  And it's a complete and utter failure.  MAGA members of Congress don't want to talk about that. 



Elon Musk, billionaire presidential vizier and de facto head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has long feuded with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), an agency that has fined his aerospace company SpaceX while conducting unwelcome oversight. Now, amid an alarming spate of air travel accidents - including a deadly mid-air collision of a passenger jet and a U.S. Army helicopter over Washington, D.C. last month, which President Donald Trump and allies callously tried to blame on cultural diversity - the tech oligarch has said DOGE will lead reforms at the FAA.

That might reassure some people impressed by videos of SpaceX's rockets, but on Tuesday afternoon, Musk, who did qualify for a private pilot certificate in 2002, seemed baffled by some of the basics of air travel. In a post on X - the misinformation-heavy social media site Musk shaped from the remains of Twitter, after buying the platform for $44 billion in 2022 - supply chain company CEO Ryan Petersen shared a screenshot of the projected flight path of a United Airlines flight from San Francisco to Houston, which hewed close to the southern U.S. border with Mexico. "Why is this plane not flying in a straight line?" Petersen wondered. Musk replied, "It should be."

While both men appeared to suggest there was something irregular or suspicious about the flight plan, this was not the case. Planes may take certain less direct routes due to weather, air traffic, or any number of factors. Indeed, Musk's own private jet has flown on curved trajectories, as captured in screenshots of flight records shared on X by Jack Sweeney, a software engineer who has worked for American Airlines and the aviation consultant UberJets, and famously aroused Musk's ire by tracking the movements of his private jet with ElonJet, a network of social accounts. (Sweeney has also monitored the flight activity of Taylor Swift, Russian oligarchs, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and his company Ground Control aims to provide "unrestricted air traffic data" to all.) Sweeney posted the flight path that Trump's plane took from Southern Florida to Texas in November ahead of a SpaceX launch, which for a while hugged the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico instead of tracing a straight line over the body of water.

"There are countless reasons why a flight might not follow a straight path - weather, [Extended-range Twin-engine Operations Performance Standards] regulations, or optimizing fuel efficiency by following favorable winds," Sweeney stated on X. 

Sweeney tells Rolling Stone that Petersen and Musk appeared to be "jumping to conclusions" to "push a point that our system is outdated, which, there's definitely things that can be updated." But, he adds, it's a complex system currently in place, and "there are reasons things were designed the way they were," including with established routes in the sky that function as aerial highways. "It takes time for things to get updated properly," he adds, which it seems that Musk's DOGE has not taken into account as it seeks to slash away at vital federal agencies, including the FAA.

It's because Alien Musk doesn't know anything.  He's never worked in these agencies, he's unfamiliar with them since he grew up in South Africa.  He knows nothing.  








Musk's ignorance is harming the American people.  Carl Gibson reports:



One of the federal workers who lost his job as a result of South African centibillionaire Elon Musk's slashing of agency budgets at the behest of President Donald Trump is warning that many Americans' most private information is at risk of being mishandled.

During a Wednesday interview on CNN, Jonathan Kamens – who oversaw cybersecurity efforts in the benefit portal for the Department of Veterans' Affairs (VA) – spoke out about what he viewed as an "inevitable" security breach. He said Musk's "Department of Government Efficiency," or DOGE (which is not an official federal agency authorized by Congress) was putting Americans in jeopardy by including critical government workers in its mass firings.
"In the time that i was at VA, what I saw was a bunch of dedicated employees trying to do their best to maintain VA.gov and keep it online and secure. But they were overworked. There just weren't enough people to do all the work," Kamens said. "And now with me being gone and other people being gone because DOGE has fired them or fired them by proxy through VA, there's even fewer people to do the work. And it's inevitable when you don't have enough people to maintain the cybersecurity of VA.gov or any other website, it's going to deteriorate and eventually there's going to be an incident."



According to a Pew poll shortly before the 2024 election, 60 percent of the 16 million Americans who have served in the military supported Donald Trump, and 55 percent believed his policies would make things better for veterans. Have they?

Consider the wrenching stories emerging from the massive, haphazard cuts that Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency are making to the federal workforce. There’s the retired Navy captain and high-ranking official at FEMA who accepted DOGE’s buyout offer, only to be later fired anyway; the security specialist at the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency whose termination letter emphasized his probationary status even though he’s a medically retired veteran with multiple years of service at the Department of Defense; the disabled Army veteran who served two tours in Iraq and two in Afghanistan and was fired from his job in public affairs at Veterans Affairs; and so many more. As one disabled veteran who voted for Trump and was fired last week put it: “We didn’t think they were going to take a chainsaw to a silk rug.”
These wholesale cuts, which ultimately could target more than 300,000 federal workers, have fallen disproportionately on veterans because the government is by far the largest employer of veterans in America: They comprise 28 percent of the federal workforce, versus 5 percent in the private sector. House Democrats estimate that nearly 6,000 veterans have lost their jobs already. A back-of-the-envelope calculation based on the cuts so far, and those currently planned, finds that as many as 100,000 veterans will be out of work when all is said and done.

What happens then? Around 36 percent of veterans in the civil service are disabled or have a serious health condition, so roughly 36,000 disabled veterans will be added to the unemployed rolls, where they are certain to face much more difficulty in landing a private-sector job than others fired in the purge—many will no doubt spiral. The question then becomes whether there will still be sufficient government services to help them.





Lawyers for the Des Moines Register and its parent company called out Donald Trump for suing the Iowa newspaper and its former pollster J. Ann Selzer, saying that his lawsuit is nothing more than an unconstitutional “work of fantasy” which only serves to confirm that the president is a “sore winner.”

Trump in December 2024, filed the lawsuit over a poll published ahead of the 2024 presidential election that predicted Vice President Kamala Harris had a slight lead in the race that Trump went on to win. Selzer’s poll, which was released three days before the election, had predicted that Harris had about a three-point lead in Iowa over then-candidate Trump, who went on to win the state by about 13 points.

Trump soon filed suit under an Iowa law against “consumer fraud” in which he accused Selzer and the Register of being in cahoots with “cohorts in the Democrat Party” who “hoped that the Harris Poll would create a false narrative of inevitability for Harris in the final week of the 2024 Presidential Election.” The complaint accuses the defendants of committing “brazen election interference” through use of the allegedly “manipulated” poll to “deceive voters.”


And she felt something wasn't right about the above or that she was missing something.  I'm not sure what that would be.  However . . .


I have no joined a chorus of 'they fixed the election results' claims.  I haven't seen any proof of it.  I'm not referring to Greg Palast's work.  Greg does great work demonstrating each election cycle how valid and eligible voters are dropped from the voting rolls.  But some people do believe -- due to Chump's remarks -- that the election was rigged.

Again, I'm not pimping that.  However, we are in discovery on this case.  And I'd use discovery to find out what Chump's polling stated.  Campaigns do their own polling.  I'd want to know what the campaign's own internal polling said.  Polling can be wrong.  And that appears to be what happened.  But if I was being sued over my polling, my first response would be to demand the campaign's own polling.  If they're going to sue me over my polling, I would want to know what their own polling found.  



Let's note one more important topic, Amanda Marcotte (SALON) observes:

For decades, the anti-abortion movement has aggressively promoted women into visible leadership roles. It's for cynical reasons, namely, to bat off entirely accurate accusations that the movement is misogynist. Never mind that there have always been women who are eager to police the bodies and behavior of other women. Enough people are credulous or at least disingenuous enough to think that "I'm a woman, which means I can't hate other women" is an actual argument. For ambitious women who wanted to climb the ranks of Republican politics, anti-feminism has long been the steadiest of ladders. The propaganda value of their gender outweighed their party's larger hostility to women in leadership. 

But now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned and Donald Trump is back in the White House, many on the right feel they no longer need to hide the naked sexism fueling their movement or put up with the annoyance of women in even token leadership positions. As Kiera Butler at Mother Jones reports, the anti-abortion movement is embroiled in an escalating civil war right now over these issues. Male leaders of the Christian right have been swarming Kristan Hawkins, the 39-year-old head of a "student" anti-abortion group, demanding her ejection from the movement. It started after she objected to Republican legislators introducing bills to charge women who get abortions with murder, an extreme move she fears will backfire on the movement. But mostly it was about growing male anger on the Christian right that women are allowed leadership positions at all. 

"Removed [sic] this woman from public service," declared influential Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon, part of the "TheoBros" movement that includes the leadership of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's church. Soon other TheoBros jumped in, declaring "We need Christian men leading the fight against abortion," arguing that women's suffrage was a mistake, and accusing Hawkins of emasculating her husband by being "busy jet-setting."
Forty-five percent of female voters backed Trump in 2024, despite his overt misogyny. Most, no doubt, believed that complicity would protect them and that the attacks would be centered on other women. But while the GOP certainly wants to strip liberal and feminist women of their rights, male MAGA leaders are showing increasing interest in bringing Republican women to heel, both culturally and through the force of law. After all, they are more likely to live and work with Republican women. If they want to feel the full flowering of male domination, it's Republican women they need to see submitting. 

Webbon and the TheoBros have been clamoring more loudly in recent months about their wish to strip women, especially their own wives, of the right to vote. "You won't let women vote? Well, our society doesn't let five-year-olds vote," Webbon explained in a May podcast. He added that "a woman is like a child" and that "God has appointed men to protect them." As Sarah Stankorb at the New Republic documented, there has been growing support in Christian nationalist circles "for the repeal of the 19th Amendment and support a 'household vote' system in which men vote on behalf of their families." Hegseth's former sister-in-law reports she heard him echo similar sentiments. 


The following sites updated:


 

  

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