spidermike007

Who? Oh, her. Melania feels "betrayed" by her staff, according to a source who spoke to the Times. Melania’s former chief of staff, Stephanie Grisham, also took a critical shot at her in her book “I will take your questions now.” If this was not enough, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, the former first lady’s friend and confidante, took a more personal view in “Melania and Me,” in which she accused her former first lady of “burning out” during her time in Washington. Recently, the ex-first lady showed up at a fancy dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Melania was there with Donald Trump. The source said that Melania feels hurt and that's why she keeps a low profile now. She only comes out in “highly controlled situations.” Speaking of her recent Mar-a-Lago appearance, the insider revealed, “She has dinner at Mar-a-Lago but doesn’t mingle and hobnob with people as he does. It’s a safe zone for him. She doesn’t view it as a safe zone.” Melania thinks she was not greeted like other former first ladies and got a lot of flak. This left-out feeling went into the fashion world too, especially when Vogue magazine didn't put her on their covers, even though she wanted it. It looks like she will only join in places where she feels okay. https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/melania-trumps-absence-from-public-eyes-tied-to-white-house-mystery-101712046025034.html

Who? Where? When has she shown up to support her husband? Why is she so absent? Huh? Any ideas?

You're just repeating the nonsense that Vance is putting out there. Vance is running scared and so is Trump, and they'll do or say anything at this point. A fellow soldier is defending Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz from accusations of “abandoning” his fellow soldiers before their deployment to Iraq, a charge leveled by JD Vance, Walz’s competitor for the vice presidency. Retired Sgt. Major Joseph Eustice said Walz “fulfilled his duty. He was a great soldier. When he chose to leave, he had every right to leave.” Eustice spoke to NewsNation about the timing of Walz’s retirement in 2005 after serving in the Guard for 24 years. Walz left a few months before the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion was sent to Iraq. “As far as I know, he did not know,” Eustice said of whether Walz knew about the upcoming deployment. “At that time, there were all kinds of rumors about us deploying. In May, when he decided to retire … we had no ‘Notice of Deployment.’ That didn’t come until July,” he added. Eustice said Walz told him before he left that he “was going to become a congressman,” and had spoken about the possibility for months before making his decision. “I didn’t think that was a great idea. I didn’t think he would be a very good politician,” Eustice said. At a campaign event in Michigan on Wednesday, Vance, who served in Iraq with the Marines, said Walz’s retirement was tantamount to desertion. “When Tim Walz was asked by his country to go to Iraq, you know what he did? He dropped out of the Army and allowed his unit to go without him — a fact that he’s been criticized for aggressively by a lot of the people that he served with,” Vance said. “The governor carried, fired and trained others to use weapons of war innumerable times,” said Ammar Moussa, a campaign spokesperson. “Governor Walz would never insult or undermine any American’s service to this country — in fact, he thanks Senator Vance for putting his life on the line for our country. It’s the American way.” “Stolen valor” is the term generally used to describe those who claim to have served in the military but did not. The “Stolen Valor Act of 2013” makes it a federal crime to lie about one’s military service in order to profit from the lie. Vance was on active duty with the Marine Corps from 2003 to 2007 during the Iraq war. Then known as James D. Hamel, Vance was deployed to Iraq with the Second Marine Aircraft Wing. His job was “combat correspondent,” which included basic communication roles such as writing articles about the events taking place in his unit. Vance was not a frontline combatant. https://www.newsnationnow.com/politics/2024-election/fellow-solider-defends-walzs-military-service/

Being critical of somebody who's highly deserving of that criticism is a completely different thing than lying. Calling all democrats socialists, Marxists, and communists is very disingenuous. It is so wrong on so many different levels and it is utterly immoral.

Very subjective. Trump not only looks very old, he acts like it too. Extreme mental inflexibility, and real cognitive decline.

Have you ever taught High School? It's very hard work, so is coaching a team to a state championship, and 24 years in the National Guard is not easy work either, and 12 years in congress is not a slouch. I realize that conservatives are desperate to find something, with some traction, that they can use to criticize this man, but that's going to be a very difficult job. He's an impressive man, he's a great orator, he's energizing the crowds and right now Harris and Walz are doing something that Trump and Vance just simply cannot seem to be able to do. Get people excited about progress. Both Trump and Vance now appear to be very dull and humorless compared to Harris and Walz.

There is no doubt that Musk is a brilliant guy, but he seems to be a terrible businessman, and would be well advised to take on some advisors in this role, if not step down from his positions as head of his companies. All too often he lets his ego get in the way of smart business decisions and he seems to be his own worst enemy on a lot of levels. This petty lawsuit is nothing but a move by a petulant guy who is used to getting his own way, and makes him look foolish. I don't have the legal expertise to know whether or not he can prevail in something like this, but it seems rather dumb and arrogant to think that you can sue and force advertisers into supporting you. Perhaps they are simply dropping X because of its financial failures. The docs obtained by Bloomberg also show X lost $456 million in the first quarter of 2023. X responded to a request for comment from Business Insider with an auto-reply saying, "Busy now, please check back later." Musk's relationship with the advertising community — from which X makes most of its money — has been strained. At an event last year, he infamously told advertisers to go "f**k" themselves after several — including Disney, IBM, Apple, and Lionsgate — abandoned the platform following a post by Musk that was criticized as antisemitic.

Ignore her. The whole socialist and communist thing is a very juvenile name calling action that conservatives engage in, when they don't have a solid intellectual argument to back themselves up. It is really just the same level of petulance that their political Master displays on a daily basis. Embarrassing, actually.

So what? He has devoted his life to hard work. A lot more than you can say about the grifter. And Trump looks about 85, and is at the beginning of very serious cognitive decline.

Thailand is in the Stone Age, when it comes to railway travel, with a 70-year-old system that desperately needs to be modernized. Whatever it takes. I advocate even if they need to borrow the money from China it's no big deal, since China's is one trillion dollars out of pocket with the Belt and Road initiative, and most countries are defaulting on it. Thailand might as well default too, that way they get a free railroad. They desperately need high-speed rail for both passengers and cargo, in order to move into the modern age. They don't seem capable of building it on their own, they're moving far too slowly, and they might as well ask for assistance. The work that China has done on their own high-speed rail is absolutely astonishing.

Thailand is now up to five medals, beating out the Philippines for the highest number of medals won by a Southeast Asian nation. Kudos to them for this accomplishment.

Jacob Thomas, communications director and a spokesperson for the progressive veterans’ group Common Defense, said it was “weird and desperate” to attack a fellow veteran’s military record. “That just doesn’t seem like a winning message,” he said. “We don’t need to spend this time hitting each other on things that don’t matter. We all served. And like I said, frankly, it just reeks of desperation.” And I totally concur and agree with that, but since both Trump and Vance are very desperate men at this point they will resort to desperate measures, and they will cling to rather hollow arguments. After all Vance never saw active combat, he was a photographer not a soldier. But Trump's has always been a coward, and I suspect Vance has always been one too, so this will be the nature of their arguments.

Trump is never strong, and these days he's increasingly weak as his cognitive mental decline is in full view to the world.

This is great news, only great amounts of shame, humiliation and egg on the face, are driving forces behind any kind of reform or change in this rather regressive nation. The reform that Move Forward wanted was simply the elimination of the abuse of power and draconian sentences, when it came to LM laws. If there was any argument that the ruling powers could have made about Thailand being a democracy, it is certainly gone now that the election was stolen from the duly elected PM Pita, and on top of that his party has been disqualified entirely in the name of regression, and preserving the status quo, as these foreign powers stated.

This is great news, only great amounts of shame, humiliation and egg on the face, are the driving forces behind any kind of reform or change in this rather regressive nation. The reform that Move Forward wanted was simply the elimination of the abuse of power and draconian sentences, when it came to LM laws. If there was any argument that the ruling powers could have made about Thailand being a democracy, it is certainly gone now that the election was stolen from the duly elected PM Pita, and on top of that his party has been disqualified entirely in the name of regression, and preserving the status quo, as these foreign powers stated. All democratic nations should call out Thailand for this heinous and ridiculous act, and lack of judicial independence.

He is an absolutely delightful man who has had a great deal of success in his lifetime and he makes both Trump and Vance look like very minor players and very average human beings. Walz’s constituents in Minnesota’s first district re-elected him, often by a considerable majority every two years. When he ran for governor in 2018, he came away with 53.9 percent of Minnesota’s vote – the largest margin a Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party candidate won by in more than 30 years. In 2022, he was re-elected with 52 percent of the vote. His re-elections are often tied to a respectable approval rating. A January 2024 approval rating poll, conducted by local Minnesota news outlet KAAL-TV, found that 55 percent of respondents thought Walz was doing a good job. But voters across the nation seem less passionate about Vance as a vice president candidate. Polling from NPR, PBS and Marist College found that Vance has a 33 percent disapproval rating – a drop from 28 percent when he was first made Trump’s running mate. FiveThirtyEight, which compiles polling from across the nation and creates an average, puts Vance at a 40.6 percent unfavorable rating. He will present his Republican counterpart, JD Vance, with a gratifyingly large problem. That problem is one of authenticity, one of the major absurdist planks of Trump’s campaign, in which the scion of a New York real estate empire accuses his rivals of being “east-coast elites”. Walz, unlike almost every other high-profile Democrat going back decades – including Hillary Clinton’s affable and somewhat Walz-like 2016 running mate, Tim Kaine – is not a lawyer. He did not go to Harvard or Yale, a fact he is proving happy to weaponise. If Walz has the energy of a dad reminding his grown-up kids to stay hydrated, he is also, on the evidence of the first day of campaigning, still very much the high school coach running the cafeteria at lunchtime, using all the modes – sarcasm, booming aggression, sudden, sharp mockery – that traditionally keep feral adolescents in order. Walz said to the crowd in Philadelphia: “Like all regular people in America’s heartland, JD Vance studied at Yale, had his career funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, and wrote a bestseller trashing that community … COME ON!” He was named the ranking member of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs in 2017. He focused on issues such as veterans’ mental health, suicide and pain management. He also called for funding to research medical cannabis treatment for veterans struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder and chronic pain. Walz served 24 years in the Army National Guard before retiring from a field artillery battalion in 2005 as a command sergeant major, one of the military’s highest enlisted ranks.

This fairly bizarre incident could have easily been resolved by simply opening the hood. The vast majority of new cars just simply have lever mechanisms that are not electronic, which leads to a latch under the hood at which point they could have simply applied bumper cables to the battery, and unlocked the door. It would appear to me that somebody did not have their thinking cap on, and it would also appear that this was quite an overreaction to a situation that was less than an emergency. Also, who would sit in their car and leave their air conditioner running without leaving their engine running? I've certainly never done that, and if you're leaving your engine running your battery is charging, so just another aspect of the situation that is bizarre at best.

He was eventually taken out by the CIA, from what we hear. Which was a beautiful assassination and something he earned. His good reputation and glory is mostly fictitious. Che’s obsession with collectivist control led him to collaborate on the formation of the security apparatus that was set up to subjugate six and a half million Cubans. In early 1959, a series of secret meetings took place in Tarará, near Havana, at the mansion to which Che temporarily withdrew to recover from an illness. That is where the top leaders, including Castro, designed the Cuban police state. Ramiro Valdés, Che’s subordinate during the guerrilla war, was put in charge of G-2, a body modeled on the Cheka. Angel Ciutah, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War sent by the Soviets who had been very close to Ramón Mercader, Trotsky’s assassin, and later befriended Che, played a key role in organizing the system, together with Luis Alberto Lavandeira, who had served the boss at La Cabaña. Guevara himself took charge of G-6, the body tasked with the ideological indoctrination of the armed forces. The U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 became the perfect occasion to consolidate the new police state, with the rounding up of tens of thousands of Cubans and a new series of executions. As Guevara himself told the Soviet ambassador Sergei Kudriavtsev, counterrevolutionaries were never “to raise their head again.” This camp was the precursor to the eventual systematic confinement, starting in 1965 in the province of Camaguey, of dissidents, homosexuals, AIDS victims, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Afro-Cuban priests, and other such scum, under the banner of Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción, or Military Units to Help Production. Herded into buses and trucks, the “unfit” would be transported at gunpoint into concentration camps organized on the Guanahacabibes mold. Some would never return; others would be raped, beaten, or mutilated; and most would be traumatized for life, as Néstor Almendros’s wrenching documentary Improper Conduct showed the world a couple of decades ago. https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=1535

Say it ain't so. Rape in prison? Who would have thought of such a thing?

I am sure that some of what she's saying has some truth and validity to it, however my big question is what were her and Harry's expectations when they spoke out against the monarchy? What did they think was going to happen? Did they think that this system that's been in place for centuries and has historically supported slavery, the incredibly evil East India Trading Company, and colonialization of dozens of countries was just going to take it lying down?

A total failure of a completely broken judicial system.

My sister-in-law was recently offered a position within the local Tambo, it's a lifetime appointment, it pays 9,000 baht per month, but there was a 200,000 baht fee to attain the position, which is paid to one of the local politicians. From what I'm told this happens with virtually any government, higher police, customs and immigration position everywhere in the country, so the entire nation is one big littoral swamp, populated by hundreds of thousands of crocodiles, preying on, and getting rich from the common Thai, who are just trying to eke out a living. Clean the swamp. Only the institution of a Singapore type law, with the death penalty for corruption, would result in any change or progress. I personally and wholeheartedly want mandatory capital punishment for financial crimes, like hanging corrupt officers or money launderers to death under gallows. I find death penalty on corruption having more benefits than imprisonment, as death penalty cuts down a corruption practicer's lives and can serve as a better deterrent in financial crimes, something imprisonment won't offer. And imprisoning a corruption practitioner would leave higher risks of them continuing such crimes and thus leaving long-term loss in economy. Hanging a corruption practitioner to death allows the slowdown in economic plundering, and effectively stops them. It's absolutely not fair to use imprisonment on these economic crimes, and as such, I find capital, lethal punishment the only viable deterrent for corruption practices and money-laundering cases. Hang em high!

Both were idealists initially. Castro became an oppressive, multi billionaire dictator. Che became a serial killer.

He was an excellent choice. He will present his Republican counterpart, JD Vance, with a gratifyingly large problem. That problem is authenticity, one of the major absurdist planks of Trump’s campaign, in which the scion of a New York real estate empire accuses his rivals of being “east-coast elites”. Walz, unlike almost every other high-profile Democrat going back decades – including Hillary Clinton’s affable and somewhat Walz-like 2016 running mate, Tim Kaine – is not a lawyer. He did not go to Harvard or Yale, a fact he is proving happy to weaponise. If Walz has the energy of a dad reminding his grown-up kids to stay hydrated, he is also, on the evidence of the first day of campaigning, still very much the high school coach running the cafeteria at lunchtime, using all the modes – sarcasm, booming aggression, sudden, sharp mockery – that traditionally keep feral adolescents in order. Walz said to the crowd in Philadelphia: “Like all regular people in America’s heartland, JD Vance studied at Yale, had his career funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, and wrote a bestseller trashing that community … COME ON!” He was named the ranking member of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs in 2017. He focused on issues such as veterans’ mental health, suicide and pain management. He also called for funding to research medical cannabis treatment for veterans struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder and chronic pain. Walz served 24 years in the Army National Guard before retiring from a field artillery battalion in 2005 as a command sergeant major, one of the military’s highest enlisted ranks.

Not even close. Shapiro would have been a mistake. He is a potential presidential candidate down the road, but now would not have been the right time, as a practicing, orthodox Jew, who supports the Gaza war. From 2006 until 2016, Walz’s constituents in Minnesota’s first district re-elected him, often by a considerable majority every two years. When he ran for governor in 2018, he came away with 53.9 percent of Minnesota’s vote – the largest margin a Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party candidate won by in more than 30 years. In 2022, he was re-elected with 52 percent of the vote. His re-elections are often tied to a respectable approval rating. A January 2024 approval rating poll, conducted by local Minnesota news outlet KAAL-TV, found that 55 percent of respondents thought Walz was doing a good job. But voters across the nation seem less passionate about Vance as a vice president candidate. Polling from NPR, PBS and Marist College found that Vance has a 33 percent disapproval rating – a drop from 28 percent when he was first made Trump’s running mate. FiveThirtyEight, which compiles polling from across the nation and creates an average, puts Vance at a 40.6 percent unfavorable rating.