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- Pulled Quote -

Immediately, Representative Clay Higgins (R-LA), who in the past supported Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and filmed a selfie inside a gas chamber at Auschwitz, posted on social media: “Lol. These Haitians are wild. Eating pets, vudu, nastiest country in the western hemisphere, cults, slapstick gangsters…but damned if they don’t feel all sophisticated now, filing charges against our President and VP. All these thugs better get their mind right and their *ss out of our country before January 20th.”

''Nazis, I hate these guys.'' - Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)

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Rep. Clay Higgins has a few other skeletons in his closet. He put a gun to the head of his ex-wife. While working as a police officer, he assaulted an unarmed Black man, lied about it, and later hired one of the other officers involved to work in his Congressional office.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/09/clay-higgins-racist-tweet-springfield-gun-wives-nazi-david-duke/

Rep. Higgins is running for re-election. We can support his Democratic opponent, Priscilla Gonzalez:

https://prisforcongress.com/

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I'm reminded of the scene in the Blues Brothers where Jake and Elwood ram the Nazis and send them off a bridge during a rally, careening into the water. The Nazis try to get their revenge in a chase scene through Chicago, but their car crashes through an overpass. As it's going down down down the second Nazi in command turns to the head Nazi and says "I've always loved you." That's how I think of Vance and Trump right now.

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Steve! Nice catch and perfect.

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I love Jake and Elwood. Jake; “I hate Illinois Nazis.”

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Thank you. Electing such in the first place gives a black eye to every public servant of character in Congress.

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According to today's Guardian:

"A former captain in a Louisiana sheriff’s office, Higgins was forced to resign in 2016 after he described members of a predominantly Black gang as 'animals' in a video that went viral. He won his House seat months later.

A Washington Post report at the time called him a 'God-fearing man of the law with a deep southern drawl ' whose no-nonsense, tough-talking approach had earned him folk-hero status."

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America’s shame. The South has risen again. Proud and evil as ever. All, those civil war deaths in vane, including my ancestors. You would think that as we live, we would learn. But hate gets passed down, just like eye color, height, etc.

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I so "unlike" this. But thanks for reality, JL.

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We wonder how these people ever get on the ballot. What was the procedure for their vetting? Low info voters are a danger to us all.

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My thoughts while reading Heather's letter:

The importance of voting for Democrats in House and Senate races to enable Harris to accomplish her goals; our goals!

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Vetting? What vetting?!

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True. Beyond basic qualifications, the voters are the vetters.

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Gives new meaning to the Vote Vets org.

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This directly results from the absence of real history, civics, and logic in our high schools.

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There is no evidence of this absence in my community schools. Is there in yours? https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/teaching-hard-history-behind-todays-news Note this perspective is from 2018.

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I think of impoverished areas and repressed curricula mandates, such as in some red states. Civics is no longer offered in many schools, nor are critical thinking skills such as logic.

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A friend invited me to a so called debate in St. Louis between Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reily when Obama was President. What a joke. As the crowd roared at the suggestion that we not only delete history from history books but that we eliminate public education, I literally begged my body to protrude puke onto the idiots. I did not speak to my friend for over a year after that and we were friends 20 years already. UG. She's come back to normalcy now but be aware- a whole bunch of conservatives would eliminate public education if they could.

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Let's be careful, Hope, of "logic."

The standardized tests all present, stress, and enforce one continuous form of logic, and that is how life needs to be seen primarily for its categories.

Thus the a-b-c-d choices largely stick to three items being in one common category, or group, with the fourth being outlier.

Another form of logic beloved by elite ghouls: the linear, with causality presented in insufferable conceits of simple chronology.

All this suits the corporate living dead who want to commodify all life, number it, and insist all units be in their hierarchical, accustomed, authority-set rank-&-file.

These status quo conceits also feed all the tribalism, group conformities of the world, from the atavistic long gripping the Middle East to the more fashionable identity silos now having taken over all U.S. corporate academe.

The human? The natural? We have literacy for that, though you won't see any evidence of that in any of our ruling elites.

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That's what you get with state control of anything. The smaller the entity; the greater chance for small minds to take control. Look at all those tiny little counties in the east.

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Please, Patricia, read Diane Ravitch's "The Language Police."

In her text and in its appendixes she cites the massive, consistent ways the conceits of standardized testing and corporate textbooks have combined to suffocate the human and the natural.

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I love Diane Ravitch. I'll add this to my list!

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It's all about money. When you have billionaires, corporations, and the federalist society pouring in huge amounts of money into these campaigns any NUT can run.

Just like they pack the Supreme Court with the 3 extremist justices when Trump was president. All bought and paid for to destroy women reproductive health care and to grant Trump immunity for his crimes. To undermine our Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

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And to stop regulation of guns, allow challenges to environmental regulations to be more successful and they have stacked the federal courts with judges who shut the doors on Plaintiffs.

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Exactly! We have to vote every state official out of office in November.

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I don't think there is a vetting process.

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Along with low information information.

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Shocking! I can't "like" that, but people like Higgins should not be in Congress. There should be a vetting process, imo.

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Good suggestion. Remember. Louisiana has a non-partisan primary on November 5. Democrats need to consolidate around a single supporter (there is another Dem candidate according to Ballotpedia). Send Priscilla Gonzalez some money. Help her make it through to the run off in December.

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From Scott Dworkin’s post today:📣

“Today we’ll be sharing this article with millions of people, using the hashtag #ExpelHiggins to make sure everyone sees our call to expel Higgins for his racist, hateful attack.”

https://open.substack.com/pub/dworkin/p/expel-clay-higgins-for-his-racist?r=fqsxl&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

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I just tried to donate to Priscilla for Congress and it said that donations are not being accepted through ActBlue right now. Paypal and Venmo are apparently, but I don't do those. I'll try again another time. Thanks, Ellie!

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I found the same; only accepts donations through venues I don't use.

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That's a shame

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I emailed Priscilla Gonzalez that a number of Substackers would like to donate through ActBlue. This moment is an opportunity for her. She replied right away:

On Thursday, September 26, 2024 at 02:22:14 PM PDT, Priscilla Gonzalez <prisforcongress@gmail.com> wrote:

"I just re-submitted my request to ActBlue so they can reinstate my account. Thank you so much! I just posted on Threads:" https://www.threads.net/@prisagonzalez_?hl=en

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Thank you, Ellie!

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Thank You, Ellie, for this and all you do to preserve our democracy.

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And Mike Johnson calls Higgins a "principled man"?! Despicable man is more like it.

I can't believe that racist son-of-a-&*@# is in office. 😠

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Thank You for the sources, Ellie!

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Mike Johnson, who called Higgins a “very principled man,”

It's disgusting, yet I burst out laughing.

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Mike wouldn’t know a principle if one showed up in the Bible. Oh, wait…

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The only principle he believes in is the almighty dollar.

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With a helping of revenge and cruelty

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Would loved to have seen Tim Russert interview Mike Johnson like he did with David Duke, another slick talking Louisiana politician.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoSJE2gZE4U

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Thank you for the link. Tim Russert was a treasure and sorely missed.

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Jim Young -- Thank you for that fabulous clip of some of Tim Russert's greatest "Pin to the Wall" moments! Yes, it would be wonderful to have Tim Russert interview [small potatoes] Mike Johnson, and everyone else. No one since has matched his skill. Can't help but wonder, though, if Tim would even bother with Mike Johnson.

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I'm pretty sure he would since he skinned a few especially clever sounding scoundrels.

Can you imagine what he could do with Vance and Trump?

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“Johnson seemed unconcerned about his colleague’s racism, saying, “we believe in redemption around here.”

Johnson is a “Christian”Nationalist so “we” only refers to other “Christian” Nationalists.

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“Redemption” is what they think excuses all the deliberate cruelty. They think that they are fooling their God. lol

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A very slick way of saying nothing. The problem is-Just exactly what are his principles? I think he has made it clear!

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Yes , I agree. It was a disgrace to the people of this country that he would even say that.

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Voodoo, anyone, Michael?

It's like a black comedy show, except it's pathetic, too, how the fat orange felon stands for nothing practical, nothing real to help most Americans.

Remember, the orange felon's chief sycophant, J.D. Vance has claimed, as to abusive relationships, that women should be forced to stay in them. Accept abuse. Just as the Clarence court has ruled women must accept states controlling their personal health.

These conceits hurt women. But the fools get their energy from how even more massively damaged white men are. And the murderous pain to women, the insulting racism to legal immigrants get more traction thanks to how the Republicans can presume all these white men as group determined, as if some mass group identity – man-o-sphere? – rules totally.

White men especially sink due to humanities’ disappearance from schools. Those white men supporting their orange felon never learned to see any individual nuances, never learned to see the personal or related complications. They learned, instead, something onerous via the machineries of standardized testing that replaced the humanities. Those tests more than anything push the logic of life set to categories. America’s white males have learned there’s nothing higher in life than proper fit to proper groups. So Republican voodoo rules.

And the deaths white men die for their mad neuterdom, their conformities – millions with nothing higher in their lives than their fat orange criminal convict cult leader.

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Sadly, and to your points, a 60% majority of white men voted for Trump in 2020. The reverse is true with women for Biden. Oops abt 52% slight majority of white women, misread that somehow. The gender gap is running full throttle this year. Here's a recent article from the Nation. https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/gender-gap-women-voters-election/

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According to Wiki and other reliable sources, 55% of white women voted for Trump in 2020. Republicans have gotten roughly a 20-point majority (or more) of white votes in presidential elections for several decades. Bigger majorities for men than women, but significant majorities in both genders. The plus side is that if 5% of white women who voted for Trump decide they’re tired of being treated like brood mares and flip to D, Harris will win in a landslide.

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I wasn’t one of the women who voted for Trump. I’ve never voted for a GQP presidential candidate, and I thought George W. Bush was bad with his stupid unfunded war in Iraq and failing to heed the examples of other nations that stayed too long in Afghanistan. However, the further the 2016 election season went on, the more I detested Donald Trump. I still detest him, and hope he doesn’t get into office by manipulating vote counts, throwing the election to a GOP Congress, or getting his SCOTUS majority to install him as dictator.

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Got to keep fighting. Blue tsunami.

https://www.mobilize.us/ft6/

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Kathy, Bush believed he was a messenger from God. Many of the MAGA cult believe Trump is a messenger from God. If God chose Bush and Trump as messengers, it is time for the son to take over the family business.

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Now would a demonstrably corrupt, accountable to nobody SCOTUS do a thing like that?

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Yez! (I know it was a rhetorical question but thought it best to have its answer in writing).

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Absolutely they would. They have their marching orders from on high.

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I'll bet a lot of those 55% are in their childbearing years.

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What that really says is that 60% of white men voted against women in 2020. There was a time when I was naive enough to think that the majority of white men loved their women. 😖

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This has been a conundrum for me. I have decided that women keep thinking their men are ok because most treat their women ok, it’s just the “others” that get put in another category. Not always true but often enough. Several years ago we and grands went to the funeral of a relative, who was a saint among men for most and he was profoundly lauded. On the way home, I told them that what was said was true, but that only applied to people who looked like him and who he felt was “worthy.” I had had more than a few conversations with him about his hero, Rush Limbaugh. Sometimes you get a glimpse of people’s hearts. I think St Peters does too. Sad that so many don’t.

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One needs to look beyond the obvious.

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I don't think they think it though, and right wing media fills their heads with hubris and garbage. Garbage In - Garbage Out; Doublethink.

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60% of registered male voters!

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Thank you, Phil. Toxic white masculinity is a real thing. I like to think it's on its way out, but Kamala is right to orient some economic goals to small businesses and non-college-educated fair-wage jobs. At least in part, that is a factor in their hatred of others and sense of failure in their lives. But more so, like on these pages, good men need to be role models.

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Absolutely correct you are, Hope.

The non-college-educated got the shaft totally when M.B.A., finance, law, and other elites offshored their millions of working-class jobs.

Trouble is, the 1971 Powell memo guaranteed that, before the decades of that predation, a new ALEC, a new Heritage Foundation, and older Hoover first combined to orchestrate their killing off of humanities in schools -- and their replacement by all the living dead ghouls and neutered conceits of since-dominant standardized testing.

The living dead ghouls and the neutered conceits still rule.

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The non-college-educated got the shaft from Democratic leadership as well as from the "the elites" with off-shoring their livelihoods. I sat stunned in a meeting where then Michigan Governor Granholm explained that all those auto workers would now be "going to college to learn computer work",, denigrating a whole class of skilled, hardworking folks in our state.

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STEM + A (for art) = STEAM. Learning science, technology, engineering, and mathematics without art is like having a driver's license with no place to go.

A rational decision is based on effort and impact. The removal of the humanities from education increased the effort and had an enormous negative impact. I propose that educators who use the acronym STEM in lieu of STEAM be treated like drivers who don't obey the rules of the road.

Interested in STEAM? Watch Being Human podcast host Richard Atherton interview Michael Gelb about his book, What if da Vinci Built Companies?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V65JIAM_LfY

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Our tuba group did a STEAM presentation on brass music at our local library. We took lengths of PVC piping to demonstrate the diameters of the various instruments, and string to show how long the tubing was. We also had one example of each of the brass instruments. The kids loved learning how to "buzz" (no other adults give them permission to make almost farty sounds by vibrating their lips) and showing how that buzz translated into a mouthpiece and then into a horn. Every kid in that group (12 or so) eventually got a musical sound out of at least one of the instruments.

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Ally, what a wonderful, fun, instructive experience! Bravo!

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!!!

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There’s the garden-hose-as-French horn fun, too.

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I recently learned there is another acronym in education:SHAPE.

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Phil! Regarding the trip to Japan with my orchestra from St. Paul, Minnesota that is the sister city to Nagasaki, we are on the fence! The brass may not have a chance to play in the combined concerts between our two orchestras, but it may be worth going anyway.

We have a decision to make in the next couple of weeks whether to commit! I admit musically my interest as a tuba player is diminished if we can't do something great like play Mahler the last time around in 1998.

But maybe I say screw it, and don't even bring my horn and just go with the fam! Maybe I just bring my mouthpiece! It is expensive, $2000 per person for the airfare alone. And then I have large issues with traveling long distances overnight, with my bipolar medications. This is a complicated decision!

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Phil and Matt, maybe keep personal information in personal communications? And you can use the little 3 dots … to delete your personal information posts.

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I sympathize, Matt. It's a long trip by air. Terrible food. Insultingly stuffed crowded.

Nagasaki, though, a beautiful city -- bays, mountains, old streetcars, great food.

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omg... I would so love to see Japan. I have long held a certain admiration for the people, what little I know of them.

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I'm lucky, D4N -- I live in "inaka," the countryside, in the middle of Kyushu.

Taketa, my little town, is formed by two mountain rivers, channeled in basalt -- the black rock which underlies all the rice-terraced, forested hills here, which formed the three large volcanic mountains around us (only one still active).

A great composer, a great painter, a great sculptor, and a great naval commander (Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05) all came from here.

Many, many Shinto shrines, Buddhist temples.

And our skies are all Miyazaki, Hayao Miyazaki ("Totoro," "Spirited Away," "Kiki's Delivery Service") all year.

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My daughter started learning Japanese at age 11, and taught in a rural town (Yabu) for a year. That interest began with Miyazaki films, especially "Princess Mononoke". The Japanese live in an amazing land with a remarkable culture.

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For things not-quite-germane to Heather's writings, Matt, you may contact me at EssDiff@gmail.com .

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By the way, shouldn’t that actually read the wanna be President and VP?

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Never again president and never will be vp

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Never was president. It was one of his frauds.

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And it's voodoo, not vudu. (Usually HCR puts "sic" by misspellings.)

Vudu was a streaming channel that renamed itself. They should sue this clown for libel. /S

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If the "immigrant problem" is as wide-spread and serious as Shay-D Vance says it is, he probably would have been able to find a actual example to illustrate it, and not have to make one up - especially one involving his own constituents.

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Read an interview with his mother—Springfield is only about an hour away.

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Magnificent!

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"I hate Illinois Nazis." - Joliet Jake, The Blues Brothers (1980)

Love these films!

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This would be a good time to put Indiana Jones back in the theatres and featured on TV. It also appears that Trump is doing everything he can to keep the film the Apprentice out of distribution.

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But chump calls dems what he is, and the cult nuts bow down. Maybe some would wake up, so worth a try. So hope the Apprentice sees the screen, soon…

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He is a classic narcissist bully. He projects constantly. It amazes me how many still will vote for him...but I'm hearing more who openly say they don't like him.

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I hear so many say how horrible he is but they will vote for him. Liz and Adam seem more sane all the time.

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Mike, my MAGAt friends are doubling down on him. I can only hope that cognitive dissonance comes to the rescue.

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I've started posting "Historians for Harris...because Facts Matter" here on Facebook. I don't think it will change any of the hard core...they still believe the propaganda. But my hope is that it touches people who aren't in the hard core camp.It looks like there's still at least 5% who can be swayed.

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Don’t think their cognition is capable of dissonance

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I don’t know if I could watch it without spending the run time nauseated.

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Oh I would heave. But I’d love to see him face accountability instead of seeing reruns of his cruel projection.

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I hope to see it IRT!

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Wonder if Trump will reap any financial benefits from the use of the name?

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And snakes

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Oh yeah, those too!

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At this point I'm over all of the people in the GOP that cover up for their racists friends and colleagues. It's insulting and disgusting. He "prayed about it". I never post racist things online and have to think about removing them later because I'm not a racist. They aren't dumb, they know what they are doing.

Let's all try and make sure that we donate and support Higgins opponent Priscilla Gonzalez: https://prisforcongress.com/

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