Did you hear about Rand Paul’s 19-year-old son?
He got on an airplane and really tied one on.
He was arrested for under-aged drinking,
But to the Paul folks’ way of thinking,
Government laws don’t apply when you’re a libertarian.
Number of votes a revised vote count found President Obama nationally won by, or 51.1% of the vote, against challenger Mitt Romney, who took 60.9 million votes and 47.2% of the total, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Obama is the first president to achieve that level of support in two elections since President Dwight D. Eisenhower was re-elected in 1956.
Amount U.S. nonfarm payrolls increased last month. The unemployment rate, obtained by a separate survey of U.S. households, was 7.8%, the same as the prior month, after an upward revision to the November figure.
I’d like to say to all of you, you did the country a favor.
— Vice President Joe Biden, quoted by Treasure Coast Newspapers, to supporters of Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-FL) who defeated Rep. Allen West (R-FL) in the November elections.
PRES. RONALD REAGAN: Social Security, let’s lay it to rest once and for all. I told you, never would I do such a thing, but I tell you also now. Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit. Social Security is totally funded by the payroll tax levied on employer and employee. If you reduce the outgo of Social Security, that money would not go into the general fund to reduce the deficit. It would go into the Social Security trust fund. So Social Security has nothing to do with balancing the budget or erasing or lowering the deficit.
Reagan tripled the national debt and George W. Bush doubled it again. But that was okay, Dick Cheney said in 2002, because Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.
On MSNBC Friday night, Rachel Maddow reported that she had recently received a very stern letter from lawyers for Fox pundit Dick Morris who objected to a report by Maddow last month on Morris’ financial activities. In the report, Maddow described how Morris paid for advertising on the birther website NewsMax only to recoup the advertising fees when NewsMax rented DickMorris.com’s mailing lists. The lawyers did not like the fact that Maddow had described the amount of money Morris laundered through NewsMax as “substantial.”
Trump’s renaming of Lake Ontario has created a litmus test —
Yield, and rename it Lake America, at Donald Trump’s behest,
Like Google and Apple, which already capitulated,
Changing the name just like Dear Leader stipulated,
But there’s one defiant holdout — the original mapping site, Mapquest.
“They’ve invested heavily in AI labs. They’ve invested heavily in data centers. So, the first family has a financial stake in this industry, and as a result, the president of the United States is compromised.”
— “Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) on Monday said President Trump will likely not heed calls from technology leaders to implement guardrails on the development of artificial intelligence because of his family’s investments in the industry,” NewsNation reports.
“Young Americans today have never witnessed Congress authorize a war, they’ve never seen a U.S. administration balance its books, they’ve never watched a well-funded and empowered state department operate, and they see only mistrust between allies. They assume the situation is normal. It is not. … The real cost of forgetting the pre-9/11 world is not a country that has changed, but one that no longer knows it could be different.”
“We’re working through some political issues in Israel. I think we agree with them on the end state. They just have a crazy election, and that makes them a little irrational in certain regards.”
— Jared Kushner, quoted by CBS News, on the lack of progress in Gaza.
Reuters has documented at least 470 targets of retribution under Trump’s leadership – from federal employees and prosecutors to universities and media outlets. The list illuminates the sweeping effort by the president and his administration to punish dissent and reshape the government.
“Iranian strikes have damaged or destroyed hundreds of buildings and other structures at bases across the Middle East, and caused about $184 million worth of damage at U.S. diplomatic facilities, according to a Pentagon watchdog report,” the Washington Post reports. “The inspector general’s report to Congress on Operation Epic Fury — the Trump administration’s name for the war with Iran — also details the extent of U.S. munitions shortages, in the first comprehensive public accounting of the war, which is now in its seventh month.”
Half (50%) of U.S. adults say they are either very concerned (23%) or somewhat concerned (27%) about the possibility that AI will cause the end of humanity, a new YouGov survey finds. Another 39% of Americans say they’re not very concerned (21%) or not at all concerned (17%) about an AI apocalypse, while 11% aren’t sure.
A majority of Americans ages 55 and up and a majority of Republicans of all ages support the use of Flock technologies in their communities, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted from August 28 to 31. Split by age, party, education level and gender, no other demographic group had a majority of support for the cameras. Among age groups, younger Americans were the least likely to support Flock, with only 21% of respondents aged 18 to 34 in favor of the technology.
About one-third (31%) of Americans strongly or somewhat approve of how the U.S. Supreme Court is handling its job, according to the latest Economist/YouGov Survey, while 53% disapprove. Almost all Democrats disapprove of the Supreme Court’s job handling (12% approve and 79% disapprove), while most Republicans approve (63% vs. 26%). Republicans who say they’re MAGA supporters overwhelmingly approve of the Supreme Court’s job handling (73% vs. 19%), while non-MAGA Republicans are more closely divided (49% vs. 36%).