Trump’s text message to the Norwegian PM

[TortoiseshellTabby]

“Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America."

This is why he’s justified in taking Greenland - apparently. How is this giant man-child in charge of the free world?

Not voting for either party or voting for an independent would also have resulted in Trump becoming President, so actually it does matter when the Democrats make themselves look unelectable by blatantly lying to the electorate.

Do you think this doesn't matter? Can you not see that this isn't about Riley Gaines but about women's rights and evidence based policy?

If the the Democrats make themselves look just as mad as RFK and toss women's rights in the bin, what is their USP?

Anyone who thinks "blatantly lying to the electorate" makes someone unelectable is gonna have a hell of a shock when they find out who Donald Trump is...

So women should give up their rights if it defeats Trump, but the Dems should not uphold women's rights to defeat him?

I hope after Boris and Trump and the rest we all learn that "entertaining" isn't actually a good quality in a leader. I'd like boring and earnest and committed to duty please. I don't need them to appear on any panel games.

Exactly. Starmer always gets a pasting but I think he’s doing a decent job with managing Trump

He's a liar and a madman, no question. Among other things.

But there are lies, damn lies and "this person with a cock and balls is a woman and you are a Nazi if you don't prove that you agree by letting him into all women's spaces". I don't know if that's what cost the Dems the election, but I can absolutely see why, when faced with a choice between Trump and someone who says this, people would choose to stay home. I would. Like Sal Grover says, if you'll lie that men can be women, I'll assume that you lie about everything.

I think you might have missed the point. Everyone knows that Trump lies, but the Democrat's lie about Biden was so big that it made it 6 of one and half a dozen of the other.

I think it was completely clear who and what Trump is and what his administration would be. The damage being suffered by women and children under him has only just begun.

Life is imperfect, but in the real world, I'll take reproductive health care for women.

Can't they just give him his stupid Star of the Week Peace Prize so he'll shut up a Greenland.

Planned Parenthood can't even bring themselves to acknowledge that there is a name for the 50% of the population who rely on birth control and access to abortions.

Women lost rights to abortion under Biden.

Are you on glue? Times have moved on, ICE is behaving like Trumps private militia, Trump is clearly deranged, no-one in America seems capable of getting the meglomaniac under control, and you think transpeople are the issue.

Wow.

Women have been attacked in American prisons by men who were put there claiming to be women and even had their sentences extended for saying men aren't women. That's just one way this ideology harms women. Losing their opportunities to fair sport is another: perhaps Riley should just be glad she wasn't a boxer so a man who everyone said was a woman couldn't break her skull.

If transgenderism was indeed a driving force behind the election results, as you seem to be suggesting it was (personally I don't know) then you'd think any party that gave a shit would realise it could end this harmful insanity AND retain the rights women did still have. But apparently not.

If women are erased in law, every other right becomes threatened. You can't devise women's rights when you can't define a woman. You can corrupt figures relating to women's needs and representation when men count as women, though.

You're telling us women should give up their rights to keep Trump out, but not that anyone should have upheld their rights to keep him out. Why do you think it's so important women should lose rights, but not so important that they should keep them? You seem to be tacitly suggesting that you think the Dems could have won if they'd not embraced this, so why the hell do you not think they should have rejected it, won the election and then improved the state of women's rights all round? It makes no sense.

Although as a PP said, the Dems lied about other stuff too and I'm not sure how much this one issue interested the average US voter.

So perhaps it would have been a good idea to field a competent candidate and to avoid creating sound bites for Trump.

Wow, I didn't realise people still used the "glue" line. It's like it's 2010 again. So retro!

But no, if you actually read the trail (perhaps you are on a more current drug of choice?) you'll see I didn't bring up transgenderism. Someone else did. So on that side discussion, raised by someone else, yes, I can see why swearing that men are women could be a vote loser, although as I've just said a few times, I am not sure how important it was to the average US voter.

Thanks for the "trip" down memory lane! Been years since I saw anyone say that without irony. I'm welling up.

Perhaps it came down to Trump just promising people they'd have more money under him ("it's the economy, stupid..."). And now he's got control of Venezuelan oil, fuel and power probably will get cheaper in the US. The cost will still come from elsewhere, of course, in both money and morality, but it might not feel that way to people. Or maybe they'll just feel richer for being in a richer country. Wealth psychology can be strange.

Trump is a global danger and a lunatic, that's for certain. Which means anyone who can't beat him in an election really, really needs to look at what went wrong.

France and Ukraine setting up a sting to test if the US was leaking intelligence to Russia is such a major claim that I went looking for sources.

The source for the claim seems to be an article yesterday in Medium by James Marinero:

Ukraine Ran Sting on U.S. Intel to Catch Russia Leaks
https://medium.com/the-dock-on-the-bay/ukraine-ran-sting-on-u-s-intel-to-catch-russia-leaks-5ffb3957c9a9

This article refers to a supposed appearance by Vincent Crouzet, a former operative of the DGSE (a French intelligence agency) on French channel LCI’s '24h Pujadas' programme on Jan 15.

However according to the Kyiv Post's factchecking, Crouzet "does not appear on the version of the show uploaded to LCI’s website".

Crouzet does appear on an LCI programme the next day, Jan 16, but does not make any claim that Ukrainian intelligence intentionally misled their US counterparts.

HUR (Ukrainian intelligence service) has now explicitly denied there has been any sting.

FACT-CHECK: Did Ukraine Run Sting on US Intel to Catch Russia Leaks?
Kyiv has rejected claims by former French operative Vincent Crouzet, saying there is no evidence to support his suggestion that Ukraine fed fake intelligence to the US to test leaks to Moscow.
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/68368

So it seems there's nothing to support this story. Which is a bit of a relief.

(edited to add more from Kyiv Post )

I'm wondering what will be tweeted at the end of his second term, given this was at the end of his first.

Oh god, painfully true!

Thank you @PerkingFaintly
It’s hard to know what is and isn’t the truth now as things are moving so fast and wildly. But the observations on that video around possible trade sanctions and even conflict between the EU and US over Greenland are still worrying.

Oh absolutely, @Lonelycrab .

And after all, a sting about leaks to Russia is actually a much more plausible story than the president of the United States sending a whiny little hurt-ass message to the prime minister of Norway saying because they didn't give him a peace prize he'd invade Greenland...

No one would ever believe the latter!

I wish that was true. But it isn't.
Vladimir Putin bears much of the blame.
Elon Musk bears much of the blame.
Fox News bears some of the blame.
The cowardice of the Republican Party is to blame.

Trump voters were sucked in. Bought or fooled, the result is the same.

Sometimes you have to do a bad thing to stop the most horrible thing ever happening.
So can't Symbol Mark II aka as The Andrew formerly known as Prince start singing though he'll probably have to undergo major plastic surgery & extreme Witness Protection whilst 'dying' in real life. He'll also need the promise of complete exposure if he ever dared blab.
He'd have to give up everything & everyone but he'd go down in History as a man who redeemed himself & saved the world from the manic satsuma.

I think I read too many David Baldacci novels (they are good though)
He wrote the novel "The Whole Truth" back in 2008 about a super-rich arms dealer who tries to provoke a new cold war/world war to boost his business.
Reminds of the world we live in today.

How does Trump's administration getting rid of women's reproductive rights, which arguably affect a far larger proportion of women, fit into this? I hardly think Trump is anything about women's rights. He's a convicted sex offender to begin with.

It's because control of the narrative is slipping away. MAGA base going back to their roots to what got their paedophile trafficker president into the position he could cause this harm.
They don't want people talking about Epstein files, or the disappearing of people, the indiscriminate killings, the armed thugs. They want people to pretend these aren't happening and instead blame the "dems" for MAGA choices.

They can fuck right off on that from me.

America is doing its best to start wwiii and you want me to look away from this. It's not just the President who is insane at this point.