The photos of the "crowds" at the tank parade remind me of when Bill Hicks would come on stage in an almost-empty club, scan the room slowly, and announce "I've had more people in bed than this" ...
When the president sends a cabinet member on TV to announce "We are using the military to liberate an American city from its elected leaders," where do you go from there. What is left to say. The idea of that being anything short of a near-universal "Wait, what the fuck is going on" moment proves how far we've backslid.
This is from 2022 but it was absolutely right. The practiced buffoonery of Trump 1, all the "just kiddings" and "seriously but not literallys" absolutely succeeded in desensitizing people who are hardly paying any attention to the harder stuff they always intended to do next. ...
The basic fallacy in chasing votes by being "tough on immigration" is that the modal American's position on the issue is "Deport the Bad ones and keep the Good ones," and they alone know who is which, and that simply does not translate into workable policy. So this kind of gestapo stuff horrifies some of the same people who cheered when Trump promised to do it. There are true sociopaths who love this, but "No, I meant only the BAD immigrants! Not my coworker/friend/neighbor!" is as likely a reaction as enthusiasm. You cannot do immigration policy that satisfies these people because what they want is nonsensical.
So by the time center-left parties fully commit to chasing the far right by "getting tough" on immigration, the backlash has already begun to build and they walk right into it. "I thought you people wanted this!" No, they want something impossible and convinced themselves they'd could have it - the "eat whatever you want AND lose weight!" of immigration policies.
It is hard to grasp but large masses of Americans are both racist/xenophobic AND not racist/xenophobic enough to applaud what Trump is doing. It's goldilocks shit, they want a level of racism/xenophobia calibrated exactly to their personal preferences, and you just can't make that policy. Don't try. ...
AP: Trump extends olive branch, invites Musk to White House cellar to taste some brand new amontillado ...
Mendacious D says:
IE isn't loading the white text background. Thus sayeth the beast:
Webpage error details
User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Timestamp: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:02:50 UTC
Message: 'PunchCard' is undefined
Line: 91
Char: 2
Code: 0
URI: http://www.ginandtacos.com/
waldo says:
It works fine in Australia.
whiskey and nachos says:
I'm not getting the white background, so the text on the main page appears over the background image, making it very hard to read. It appears normal when I click on the comments, though.
Desargues says:
Firefox. I see everything fine, but the text is kinda small. I believe Jazzbumpa too has complained about that.
Amanda says:
I use IE and it's just that the white background isn't showing up.
Amanda says:
Wait, if I read individual entries the white background is there. It's on the main site where the entries are listed one after the other that the white background disappears.
Michael says:
No problems on my IE.
StephenM. says:
The white background is gone on the main page. I have/use IE 8. It works fine on most pages unless …
AG says:
I read your posts on Google reader, and have never had any problems with the back ground image, etc.
I don't have any problems reading this post on FF 3.5.3 or IE 8.0.6001.18702 (wtf? long version number!) either.
Will says:
Your page is all fouled up in Lynx, too.
JohnR says:
It's the 'newerest' IE; on my steam-powered PentiumII/Win98 system at work with blunt-edge IE 6 (and honestly – shouldn't that be officially Microsoft Mosaic v.6?), it works fine, but at home on my relatively hot-rod dual-core/XP/IE7 system, it started getting the funky background problem this past week, probably due to some sneaky MS update that XP likes to do when it's bored.
ShortWoman says:
Well, even though I use Firefox as my primary browser, there are still a bunch of sites that require MSIE. In fact, the local Realtor's organization property search not only requires IE, it requires IE for Windows! that means that part of my migration to Macintosh involved an emulator that pretty much only runs IE. Sure, I meant to run Quicken over in that partition too, but we switched to a better solution.
Parrotlover77 says:
IE8 in standards mode (default) is the problem. Clicking the compatibility button fixes it because it reverts to quirks mode (aka, Don't Break Teh Web (TM) IE7 rendering mode). Apparently your site is no longer standards compliant. Note: snark regarding Firefox and standards compliance withheld from this post.
doug says:
thanks pl77 compatibility (under tools) button works great.
dbsmall says:
pɹ1ǝʍ sı p1ɹ0ʍ ǝ10ɥʍ ʎɯ 'uıɐb4 uǝɥʇ .ǝɯ 4 bu1ɥʇʎɹǝʌǝ uo ǝuıɟ 7snظ sʞɹ0ʍ ʇı
(It's worked on Firefox and IE 8 on Windows Vista and 2000.)
jazzbumpa says:
Yes, I mentioned small font size as bring a poblem for my bifocalated ocules.
Since then, I've noticed that if I hold down the control while spining the scroll wheel on my mouse, The page image can be made larger or smaller. Voila – problem solved!
I have a Sony lap top running a pre-production evaluation version of Win 7 Ultimate, with Firefox 3.0.
No problems with background, ever.
Cheers!
JzB
jazzbumpa says:
Control KEY, that is.
JzB
beau says:
I've noticed this problem once or twice using firefox. As others have said, once I open the comments, all is well.
displacedCapitalist says:
Chrome holla!
bob in pittsburgh says:
I'm using Opera and have the same situation: background makes the text very hard to read until I go to the individual post.
cole says:
Safari's just fine
beau says:
correction – IE @ work, not firefox. firefox @ home works swimmingly.
Kulkuri says:
No problems with IE here.
Thanks jazzbumpa, I learned something, now if I will only remember it when I need to make things larger or smaller.
bosanquetrossen says:
Hi – ginandtacos.com's pages don't properly display some punctuation & other special characters properly – have you tried switching your wrodpress settings from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8? Cheers, –Justin