I wouldn’t say he “doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”  I would say that he’s a pathological liar, and he knows that tens of millions of idiots believe what he says, regardless of how baseless.

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Like so many of us, I like to figure out the meaning of vanity license plates.  Of course, some are personal and are not designed to be understood, e.g., the car-owner’s initials, or his love for someone named “Judy.”

Others, like the one at left, are clearly meant to be interpreted.  But what, specifically, does this one mean?  Considering that he lives in this state, is he sorry for Mississippi?  Is he sorry that he, for some reason, has (or had) to leave Mississippi?

I’m guessing that this is akin to Neil Young’s line about the state’s neighbor to the east, which goes: “Alabama, you’ve got the rest of the union to help you along. What’s going wrong?” He’s thinking about how nice it would be if Mississippi would stop embracing ignorance and prejudice, and join the rest of the modern world.

I’m not sure that’s a message I’d feel safe displaying in the Deep South, but I salute the guy’s bravery.

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Here’s Pete Buttigieg speaking on the subject, and, in my view, he’s 100% correct.

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I know I’ve been asking myself this since Trump came on the scene 10 years ago, but: Who’s stupid enough to believe all this crap? 

Isn’t there a limit?

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My wife can’t stand it when I watch Fox News–even for a short period of time.  But when she’s out of the room, I’ve been known to flick it on for a few seconds to see what they’re covering.

What I notice is frequent reporting on Joe Biden–yes, the guy that left office last January.  If you’re going to present Trump in the best possible light, you need an explanation for the president’s most controversial actions, like bringing the National Guard into our major cities to control the skyrocketing crime rate (that doesn’t exist), or why we need to build concentration camps, or a horrible report on job numbers.

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At left we see the news we all saw coming.

This will present an interesting dilemma for a state, many of whose people will find themselves in the classic condition of cognitive dissonance:

If Trump is making America great again, then why are economic conditions suddenly so abysmal?

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Trump made a comment about Baltimore yesterday during a press conference.  This came after his announcement that he was deploying the National Guard to Washington, D.C., and that the federal government had taken control of the Washington, D.C. police department, in what he called a “historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse.”  He went on to cite Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Baltimore and Oakland as cities facing serious crime problems — adding that Baltimore and Oakland are “so far gone” that “we don’t even mention [them] anymore.”

A problem arose, however, as problems so often do, when Trump’s statements are at odds with the facts.

From CBS News:.

Baltimore mayor Brandon Scott, who announced earlier this month that Baltimore’s violent crime rate is at its lowest in decades, responded in a social media post Monday afternoon.

“This is the latest effort by the president to distract from the issues he should be focused on — including the roller coaster of the U.S. economy thanks to his policies,” Scott wrote. “When it comes to public safety in Baltimore, he should turn off the right-wing propaganda and look at the facts. Baltimore is the safest it’s been in over 50 years. Homicides are down 28% this year alone, reaching the lowest level of any year on record.”

Not all of Trump’s critics would use the word “distraction” here; they assert that it’s something more pernicious.  Is the president, as some suggest, angling towards a way to impose martial law as a tool to prevent elections in 2026 and 2028?

 

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I’m guessing (actually hoping) that readers don’t know who Newsmax anchor Rob Schmitt is.  On his show tonight he interviewed acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and “border czar” Tom Homan, and asked his guest, “How many illegal aliens are there in this country?  Are there 50 million? 150 million?”

Homan estimated 20 million.

According to the groups that study this closely and whose data is highly regarded, e.g. the Pew Research Center:  The unauthorized immigrant population in the United States grew to 11.0 million in 2022, according to new Pew Research Center estimates based on the 2022 American Community Survey, the most recent year available. The increase from 10.5 million in 2021 reversed a long-term downward trend from 2007 to 2019. This is the first sustained increase in the unauthorized immigrant population since the period from 2005 to 2007.  However, the number of unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S. in 2022 was still below the peak of 12.2 million in 2007.

Whatever.

Yes, the MAGA crowd is completely convinced that criminal immigrants are flooding our borders and ruining our society.  But that’s not my point.

Rather, it’s this: Newsmax is suggesting to its dimwit viewers that the 150 million figure, about half of the nation’s population, might be plausible.  They want us to believe that when we leave our driveways, shop for groceries, and drop our kids off at school, for every actual citizen we meet, there is an approximately equal number of illegal aliens.

That’s the level of ignorance we live around.

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There is 23,000 times more farmland in America than there is solar PV on farmland.

In addition, there are clever ways to integrate solar with agriculture, called “agrivoltaics.”

 

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I would bet a dollar against a nickel that the meme here is clickbait, and that this absurdly expensive solar/wind solution exists nowhere on Earth.

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