This is what happens at a deliverance service: US Politics April 2022

I think this is the month where there's going to be a LOT of accountability. a lot of things that we've all known about for years and years, ol Donnie wriggling, etc - I think in April 2022, this is the month when all of them have to actually own what they did, and maybe - just maybe - repay to society some of the harm the inflicted on all of us. especially the dead people. *fingers crossed*

WASHINGTON, DC - Nancy Pelosi resigned this morning. she said she was so sorry

source

Donald Trump just died! he fukken died

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cz0LY0I5bLA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGNVU5ZjlgA

into this song

worst cult of personality ever pic.twitter.com/oBH0IUF6r7

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 1, 2022

"If you liked your plane crashing in the swamp and most of your band dying in horrific circumstances, then you'll LOVE DeSantis's approach to COVID"

what is this thread title?

it's kind of a deep cut

Back underneath the big tent, the exorcising of evil spirits continued with a Kentucky teen who had been brought to the service by his grandfather, Nightingale, a church attendee. The boy, Bronson, had been writhing on the ground, beset, when he suddenly got up and sprinted for the door.

Volunteers from the church, in black hoodies, tackled the teen in the back of the room. They held him down, rubbed his back with Bibles, prayed in tongues and exclaimed, “Out, out, out!” One blew a shofar, the ram’s horn normally used in Jewish religious ceremonies that some Christians also use.

The two had watched Locke together online, but it was Bronson’s first time at a service, Nightingale said. The boy, who had never sworn before, according to his grandmother, was now cussing at the volunteers and growling.

“This is what happens at a deliverance service,” Locke said from the pulpit. “Cry it out, shout it out, weep it out, snot it out. We’re going to set people free tonight.”

Suddenly Bronson’s tight body went limp. The volunteers huddled over him. When they helped him to his feet, he was smiling and calm, ready to be baptized. “Amen, I never had to chase nobody before,” one of the volunteers told the teen.

“There’s a first time for everything,” Bronson said. They went up to the front of the room, where a livestock watering tank painted sky blue inside awaited and the Praise band began softly playing the worship song “No Longer Slaves.”

“I’m no longer a slave to fear, I am a child of God,” they sang. Locke came down from the stage all smiles. Bronson stepped gingerly into the tank.

“Upon your confession of faith in Jesus Christ, the power and glory of the Gospel and this beautiful deliverance we have seen tonight, I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit,” Locke said, dunking Bronson into the water as the music swelled.

Bronson came up, water sluicing from his jeans and shirt, smiling radiantly. His grandfather wrapped his arms around his neck from behind and crooned into his ear along with the music, “You are a child of God.”

“Hallelujah,” everybody said.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/03/31/tennessee-pastor-extremist-politics/

One thing you can say about white evangelical christians and their Republican representatives in Congress, they're no angels.

picturing Tom Hardy as Locke in the movie Locke and Tom Hardy as Bronson in the movie Bronson playing the roles of Locke and of Bronson in the above narrative

how does that article relate to us politics, you might ask?

well, you see, my new theory is that to the extent that a national conversation takes place any more, or people are actually persuaded or able to change their mind on something, whether it be by thinking about what is right and wrong and that kind of shit, or just good old fashioned peer pressure from people they personally know, or whether it be a warning from your spiritual leader that you will burn in hell eternally if you don't do what they say, that kind of political conversation happens in churches.

wherever three or more of them are gathered in His Name there are three or more people who agree who the outsiders are

The unrepentantly Trump-garbed guy in my shop walked by this a.m. to tell a co-worker that he was retiring all his Trump gear (he daily wears stars & stripes hats, "Trump in 2024" shirts, etc.). We didn't get into a talk about why, as he and I have had words about how/why he (a quality inspector) could overlook Trump's character and actions. I doubt he's walking back all his support, but am pleased to see one less billboard and felt my work stress ebb slightly.

where the cocaine orgies, I just came for the cocaine orgy part

The Reformation was a terrible terrible mistake.

As the filing deadline approached Friday to run in the special election to fill Alaska’s lone U.S. House seat, the field got crowded, with current and former lawmakers, former Gov. Sarah Palin and others jumping in.

More than 50 candidates had signed up by Friday afternoon, according to the Alaska Division of Elections, with more possible by the 5 p.m. deadline. Some candidates who’ve entered were expected; others were surprises; others have never been elected to office and had little or no experience in politics.

In the special election, voters will select who will replace the state’s congressman of 49 years, Don Young, who died suddenly while traveling back to Alaska two weeks ago.

The primary election date is June 11, but this will be Alaska’s first statewide by-mail election. Ballots will be mailed to overseas voters starting April 27, and Alaskans have until May 12 to register or update their addresses in order to receive a ballot.

Final results will be announced June 26, and the top four vote-getters advance to the Aug. 16 special general election, where a winner will be chosen by ranked-choice voting.

The special general election is on the same date as the primary for a full term in office, and one or more candidates could appear in both the special general and the regular primary. The four winners of that primary will advance to a ranked-choice vote during the November general election.

Staffers disclosed that she had 0 use for this kind of complicated hugga-bugga as Governor. Jump straight to the recount ffs!

Oops, sorry, Anchorage Daily News!
https://www.adn.com/politics/2022/04/01/live-updates-alaskas-us-house-race-expands-as-5-pm-deadline-nears/

I've been taking an RX for a chronic condition for years. This week, I learned my insurance no longer covers it. Now the cost is $639-a-month! How many people can afford that?
"Your money or your life" is a hell of choice that people shouldn't have to face.

— David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod) April 2, 2022

If only someone could have done something about this!

Get a job, axelrod. If you were a hardworking American your insurance would cover it

wait how the actual fuck is his premium scarcely higher than mine? He’s 20+ years older and I’m rolling with a laughably terrible bronze plan and no conditions.

ok nm looked again and his premium is like 28% higher (mine has been kind of all over the map as I’m self/employed and Covid contributed to wildly disparate income over the last few). but still! no condition, shitty bronze plan (I’m presuming he’s got better coverage), and I suppose has been subsidized by U of C. but still fuck this universal healthcare care now or gtfo

my insurance went from $19/month to $309 a month because i moved to a new state and got divorced

i should have stayed where i was and patched things up. for my health, but more important, for america

Grooming! https://t.co/3xxbO6mbCH

— Peter Elkind (@peterelkind) April 4, 2022

what year is it, 1954? Jesus

Well hell they’re still on the “gays are pedophiles” trip nothing changes

NEW: Tennessee Republicans are advancing a bill that creates a separate, privileged class of marriage for heterosexual couples, acting as a loophole to the Supreme Court’s legalization of gay marriage. The bill would also legalize child marriage by eliminating age requirements.

— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) April 5, 2022

🐦[NEW: Tennessee Republicans are advancing a bill that creates a separate, privileged class of marriage for heterosexual couples, acting as a loophole to the Supreme Court’s legalization of gay marriage. The bill would also legalize child marriage by eliminating age requirements.
— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) April 5, 2022🕸]🐦

Are you a racist? pic.twitter.com/Fdknxld39i

— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) April 5, 2022

Debate is heating up on Capitol Hill on funding the military, and Democrats are facing a dilemma — back President Joe Biden’s historically high Pentagon budget or spend even morehttps://t.co/86uTi0msil

— POLITICO (@politico) April 5, 2022

$800 billion! No, $810 billion!

jfc, that JD Vance ad. a big giant fucking racist, pointing the finger at the camera and whining about how everyone's calling him a racist, while also saying "This issue is personal. I nearly lost my mother to the poison coming across the border."

still can’t believe he was able to con so many ppl into thinking he was some kind of hillbilly whisperer. anyway, here’s an evergreen tweet I enjoy whenever this absolute grifter pokes his dumb baby head up.

you see jd v*nces tweets and fully understand why his mom traded him for some perc 30s

— samuel (@samtrayter) July 31, 2021

One day, two ads from GOP #OHSen candidates grumbling about being called a racist.

"I didn't do two tours in Anbar Province fighting alongside Marines of every color to come home and be called a racist," Josh Mandel says in ad that shows him invoking MLK on the Pettus bridge. pic.twitter.com/MjWWGqWeY1

— Henry J. Gomez (@HenryJGomez) April 5, 2022

telling racists they're not racist seems to be the hot new thing in the ohio primaries. not sure why they bother tbh. trump didn't.

like what percentage of people who will actually vote for him, as opposed to his much more MAGA-attuned opponent, actually believe that the opioid crisis was caused by… Mexicans? do suburban conservative dudes in ugly vests who work in F/I/RE and drive 70k trucks believe that? I guess it’s possible?

'more illegal drugs and more democrat voters pouring into this country'

I know they do grow some democrats near Oaxaca, hidden among the avocados and mangos... big ripe juicy democrats

telling racists they're not racist seems to be the hot new thing in the ohio primaries. not sure why they bother tbh. trump didn't.

i don't know, trump and maga people are definitely one kind of american racist, but i think there is also a big chunk of white america who have had recent verbal confrontations with their children, in which insinuations were made that they were racist because they keep voting for the GOP every year, and they yearn for someone to give them some reasons why they aren't racist. such as, that JD Vance's mom almost died of an overdose (? JD Vance makes no sense to me, either. i think conservative voters in Ohio are just horrible people. their level of racism was more acceptable when they were young, and they refuse to change or ask questions of themselves. i hope i'm wrong on that, it's just a gut feeling)

but i think there is also a big chunk of white america who have had recent verbal confrontations with their children, in which insinuations were made that they were racist because they keep voting for the GOP every year,

Sounds about right. These people think they can't be racists because they think the n-word is evil.

Evil but also, like, "just a word."

"And some of my best friends"
"I don't see color" etc.

that's my entire paternal line of my family (who all vote republican). it's impossible to discuss anything nuanced with them. they feel like they were painted and accused of being racists by the entire liberal / left / dem cohort of the US.

right, all that stuff. that, to me, is the most common form of racism i've encountered in my life, and of course like many people i didn't realize it was there for too long. the conservative way of life is to refuse self-interrogation. i think for a lot of people, "change" is a thing that happens out in the world, materially, events, things you can see and describe easily. but it's not something that happens in how they think about things, the interior life, challenging preconceptions. so no, they will never change.

two tours in Anbar Province fighting alongside Marines of every color...

He joined the Marines and he re-upped. Other than that he had no fucking choice about any of the details he's claiming credit for, like being in Anbar or the color of the Marines he fought beside.

Apparently there's something amiss with one of the photos in that Mandel ad...

Nice hands, Josh. pic.twitter.com/j9VMd1wNgn

— Ti5QU4NTUM🌻 (@Ti5QUANTUM) April 5, 2022

my hands are brown, i know
but they're not yours, they are my own

still can’t believe he was able to con so many ppl into thinking he was some kind of hillbilly whisperer

^probably unfair of me to phrase it this way. i don’t suppose it was really “so many ppl”; mostly just thoroughly shook centrist outlets and media assholes looking for clues in the wake of 2016. and tbh—as my faith in the meritocratic/ technocratic hadn’t been beaten out of me quite yet—if Trumpism had happened & succeeded 4 years earlier I might have been susceptible to his brand of horseshit.

not their fault that everyone who knows how to use Photoshop is a liberal

xp "so many ppl" seems fair enough, at least before JDV showed his pungent ass on Twitter so often.
Hillbilly Elegy was a best-seller, wasn't it? And/or favorably reviewed, got him some op-ed writing for WSJ, and a Major Motion Picture--or at least,

84% liked this movie
Google users
A Yale Law student reflects on his family's history and his own future after returning to his Appalachian hometown.
Release date: November 11, 2020 (USA)
Director: Ron Howard
Adapted from: Hillbilly Elegy
Distributed by: Netflix
Starring: Amy Adams; Glenn Close; Gabriel Basso; Haley Bennett; Freida Pinto; Bo Hopkins; Owen Asztalos

College debt is not something that happened way in the past... it's happening right now, as we speak. Will the Gov keep issuing new loans and keep the status quo just rolling along?

just the other day they postponed the resumption of federal loan payments to August. they keep bumping it down the road another few months.

Right, but are they issuing new student loans? Will there be any structural changes, or will this just be a one-time amnesty? And all the future students are shit out of luck?

Yeah, reforming the whole system is the thing that really needs to happen. The forgiveness is a first step, but the predatory system that creates the debt has to change.

don’t worry, being told to fuck yourself from time to time is the price of admission around here.

^^new borad description?

The political problem with debt forgiveness isn't underwater basket weaving so much as 'didn't go to college.' The hypothetical Bernie bargain was forgiveness + free college going forward (you don't benefit from forgiveness but your kid benefits in the future) + M4A taking some of the weight off our lives. Obviously I think forgiveness is good but politically debt forgiveness alone is at best a wash and might be a negative because it will (understandably) generate resentment.

They're not just kicking the can w/r/t student loans, btw. It doesn't get as much press, but they gave out a ton of SBA money at the start of the pandemic — I got a $20K loan that I used to start my record label, and was supposed to start making payments last July, but have subsequently been told not to worry about it until January 2023.

they're likely gonna need to forgive at least some student debt (even if it's just interest accrued since the start of the pandemic) because everyone's bills coming due at the same time would be catastrophic for the economy. wouldn't it?

This, we need more of this.

I’m somewhat loath to get so personal but I feel like I need to tell this story. My mother died in December 2020 with what I believed at the time to be $40k in student loan debt.

— Michelle Miller (@michelleimiller) April 28, 2022

milo's summation is otm. the systemic solution is comprehensive enough to win public approval. free (public) college going forward brings working class adults who never went to college into the grand bargain by giving their kids something. otherwise it looks like 'liberal elitism' to them.

what if we just do a "do over", wipe everything lean, evenly split up all the money, and we each get a free starting weapon

wasn't free two-year college part of build back better? not that that means anything to anyone, since bbb isn't happening

fwiw the average student loan debt and the rate of default is higher for black women than any other group.

https://www.investopedia.com/student-loan-debt-by-race-5193137

hmmm can't imagine why

i'd like to think this would be an argument advanced by the whitehouse against the underwater basket weaving criticism, but they're probably too worried about the whole racial resentment thing to want to draw attention to it.

"This text message that's supposedly mine, I don't know if it is ..."

Marge Greene gets hot when confronted by Jim Acosta today about the text by her suggesting Trump should declare martial law. pic.twitter.com/Rq1KgsKuyT

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) April 28, 2022

the dumbest thing is that she spelled it Marshall Law, like the tekken character

No no no she meant John Marshall!

"See, no, it says some people are saying it."

GOP Rep Madison Cawthorn is caught on video with his male staff member's hand on his crotch | Daily Mail Online https://t.co/Rcd7PwSwGv

— John Bresnahan (@bresreports) April 28, 2022

Jfc all this shit that’s coming out on him I guess the coke orgies were real

'Outing' Cawthron feels cheap... he deserves to be called out for being a fucking incompetent asshole, nothing more

Well, an incompetent and treasonous asshole.

We haven’t even reached the tip of the iceberg with MC, I sense.

Well yeah but the kind of shit that’s coming out seems to indicate someone is trying to make him look bad among the right

Kind of like the "Nestor" thing with Gaetz. Whatever happened to that kid, anyway?

If he and the right can team up to curb stomp his image, they may just be able to get him re elected with a larger margin of the vote

Special place in hell for closeted gay dudes who side with the people who want to kill them, stopped being sympathetic to such types years ago.

Man, no wonder he was crying when he came out of McCarthy's office. They had a Powerpoint of all the dimes they were about to drop on him.

This does add another level of intrigue to his recent attempt to bring a loaded pistol aboard a plane to DC

the dumbest thing is that she spelled it Marshall Law, like the tekken character

she presumably meant to misspell it Marshal Law, which would have been like an earlier and funnier fictional character

1984 is a great fiction novel to read but it seems like it is becoming the reality we are currently living under more and more each day.

— Madison Cawthorn (@CawthornforNC) August 11, 2021

Narrator: "Representative Cawthorn had never read 1984."

"...but neither had any of the voters he was speaking to, so he and they bonded together, glad and secure in the knowledge that they need not speak openly about the shared secret of their total ignorance."

1984 is the second most important book I’ve ever read about Americans

The First: Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs

The second: The Art of the Deal.

Narrator: "Representative Cawthorn cannot read."

"Great fiction novel to read" is so perfectly succinct and descriptive.

1984 was a popular book and it still is

All the jokes about his sexuality had me looking up Madison Cawthorn's homophobic past, and it's pretty disturbing. He once slammed a gay man into a concrete barrier, crippling him for life.

— Sridhar Ramesh (@RadishHarmers) April 29, 2022

https://emojipedia-us.s3.dualstack.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/thumbs/120/apple/325/pinched-fingers_1f90c.png

I knew Aaron Schock and you, Caw, are no Aaron Schock.

Holy shit Sridar lmfao

Special place in hell for closeted gay dudes who side with the people who want to kill them, stopped being sympathetic to such types years ago.

table OTM

Holy shit Sridar lmfao

He's a friend of a friend, apparently also a brilliant mathematician.

uh oh, more trouble in paradise

https://www.rawstory.com/marjorie-taylor-greene-2657236317/

Surprised they didn't start shooting at each other.

uh oh, more trouble in paradise

https://www.bravotv.com/sites/bravo/files/styles/blog-post-embedded--computer/public/2019-10/taylor-armstrong-cat-yelling-meme.jpg