And while she has positioned herself as an influencer on social media, Fauci has largely retired from public life and last I heard, was spending a few hours a month teaching. So, who is weaponizing what? And who is self-aggrandizing?
I was thinking about how stressful it must be to live like that where everything, even your personal life, has to be strategized and messaged and it's such an aggressively nasty way. I tend to think that people who live with so much stress often end up getting sick if not now then later in life has it all accumulates. But you're right, please don't seem to be people who feel empathy or self-reflect in a way that allows for shame of any kind. One of the things that upsets me the most is that these people won't even have a sort of internal moral reckoning when this is all over and they're sick enough to go about their lives believing they did what was good and right. Ick.
Yeah that's another excellent point and something I've been thinking about. Do you remember 10 years ago when all this started whenever there be a new Trumpian character (and Trump himself of course) we would be like, "oh that poor guy's wife," or "oh that kid must be so embarrassed," only to learn that the entire family it's just a awful as their most public facing member?
Actually it may be that the strategizing and messaging comes as naturally as breathing for certain personality types. A drive to dominate whoever and whatever is around a person plus the combined senses of superiority and grievance is what it takes to behave that way.
Holy holy shit! Katie Miller! What evil planet did these people arrive from? I’ve followed Fauci’s career since the 80s when he emerged as a shining star in the fight against AIDS. He is truly a great man in the purest sense — devoted to science, truth, and helping humanity.
Apparently that’s now a grave offense in itself. Is this also because he worked to cure AIDS, which the far right sees as God’s punishment for homosexuality?
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> Blanche may still become attorney general in a permanent capacity... That corruption will continue under Blanche or any Trump-appointed successor. So this victory may only be transient, and in any case will be limited in its practical effects.
That's true, but at the same time, blocking this nomination - even temporarily - prevents the administration from moving on to its next destructive project with the same level of energy.
This is why I favor fighting on every front - because every minor monkey-wrench, every delay, every little bit of sand that can be thrown in the gears of the authoritarian machine gives the opposition space to grow.
It perhaps brings the corruption surrounding this particular guy to the forefront of people's attention for a little while at least...Epstein files and slush fund...even those who only worry about the price of gas and food might notice those things if enough noise is made about them.
Whenever I am mad at my parents over something, I have to remind me that I am light years better off than the kids of Stephen and Katie Miller.
Francesca Hong is so far out of the mainstream in WI and the Dems are playing Russian roulette at best if not taking an outright suicide mission that is off target.
And on a more personal level, for those of us living in WI, it is the possibility, even likelihood, of returning to the Scott Walker years and potentially even worse as the GOP falls into line with the President and his irrational whims and behavior. Just when we thought that divide-and-conquer had been buried in the landfill of history, it looks to be alive and healthy after all.
Not necessarily. Polling shows Hong vs. Tiffany is a toss-up among likely voters. And if this is a blue-wave year, Dem's will win more toss-ups than they'll lose.
Sadly, I think you are too optimistic. Charlie Sykes made a good point that there are a lot of conservatives here, disenchanted with the current presidential administration, who might be open to more moderate Democratic candidates, but they absolutely will not vote for Hong. It will be Tiffany as the perceived lesser of two evils.
While I agree with her on certain issues, there is no universe in which the idea of defunding the police and abolishing jails plays well with the overall electorate. Guess what soundbites we already are hearing in political commercials here, with the dark money pouring in to paint her as a political Satan. With that and more played over and over, and set to sink in all the way to November, the outlook is grim if she is the nominee -- too much, too far, too fast, for too many people.
I've seen this play out before, in the Tea Party days. Remember "I'm not a witch"? It saved the Dems bacon then. Looks like Dems are succumbing to the same fever swamp dreams as the Tea Party did and have decided to nominate extreme candidates, consequences be damned.
Yes. They are falling in love with what they see in their own mirror, which almost always is a bad thing in a world that sees the warts that they don't want to acknowledge are there.
Tiffany is still the greater of 2 evils. Since conservatives swallow conservative propaganda hook, line, and sinker, they're easily convinced to vote against theirs and the state's best interests. WI still has a legislature, correct? I can't see either Dem or magat state senators and reps allowing her to defund the police 100%. BTW Thanksgiving is a Federal holiday. She can't do shit about abolishing it. Conservatives are too intellectually lazy to understand that.
Agreed about where the true evil lies. But the problem is that perception becomes reality, and Hong's own unguarded words from years ago will be used against her now as the right and its supporters increasingly shape the narrative. I've been asking for a while now how she could get her agenda through a GOP-controlled state House and Senate -- it isn't going to happen. So the liberal wish list is destined to stay merely that, whereas a more moderate candidate likely could effect more change, and with less divisiveness.
I get it why the far left likes her candidacy, and that she is a fresh face, but the reality is that both of those things work against her when the whole electorate is considered, not just those on the left who believe in themselves and their purpose. The far left needs to do a better job of counting the votes ahead of time, reading the room, and understanding that they have to play the long game rather than putting all of their eggs into this particular basket. The consequences of failure right now are simply too profound and too far-reaching to justify such an extraordinary gamble on their part.
Right, but look at all the chaos that the 6 DSA city council members has created in Portland.
The message from them is that Portland is "closed for business". They tried to strip money out of the budget (secretly, I might add) that was geared toward bringing in new businesses and jobs. All this as the tax base shrinks and folks move to Clackamas county. PDX was rated the second worst metro for multi-family housing investments in the USA. That means rents are falling. Everyone wants their individual rent to go down but collectively, as a city, when that happens, it means terrible economic news is driving it. Just like deflation.
It doesn't matter if she wants to defund the police or not: the governor sets the message for the entire state.
I'm not sure they are intellectually lazy. I think they just believe that the head of a government ,whether it's the governor or the president, calls all the shots and makes all the decisions...like the CEO or owner of a business does. It's why authoritarianism feels natural to them.
Instead of focusing on sound bites- Hong is an actual elected state rep from Madison (damn those college towns with smart people), with a track record in office. A strong advocate for economic and environmental justice, there is a reason she cleared a crowded field. I’m interested in what Ben Wikler has to say, with no shortage of opportunities on his current book tour.
Unfortunately, the failure of the Dem establishment to define any effective means of opposition to the Felonious Menace has enabled the party's leftists and the DSA in particular to harness the public anger of the moment to their ambitions. It's almost like the Tea Party takeover of Republican politics in 2010, which later birthed the Menace. The worst thing is that their rise comes at exactly the time when their platform can do the most damage, by limiting the rejection of the fascist MAGA crowd. If they prevail in primaries and lose in general elections, that will be a strong indictment of party leadership for lethargy and fiddling while Rome burned.
Can you please explain your logic here? Is is that FL/TX are so far right that it moves everyone else on the far left to the middle? To me, that makes zero sense. "mainstream" would be proposing policies supported by, say, 60% or more of the population.
That doesn't mean one can't get elected by being out of that segment, due to our extremly warped primary system, but in a functioning system that wasn't party-based, one of either Hong or Tiffany would not be the nominee as a "top 2" system where many were voting in the primary would not nominate 2 extremists as the top 2 vote getters.
This latest Fauci obsession on the right is so obviously another "Look, squirrel!" deflection on their part to change the subject away from all else that we really need to be discussing -- the lousy economy, the Trump War, Epstein, ICE out of control, presidential grift and corruption, and so much more of the curriculum vitae of failure that is the achievement list of this administration over its first year and a half.
That is bad. Worse still is 1) how low they will go, the depth to which they will sink in the slime pit, to smear and destroy anyone who stands in the way of their total grasp of power and lack of accountability for any and all mistakes that they are making. And 2) how so many seemingly rational, reasonable, sane people otherwise in everyday life can be so sickly twisted and manipulated when it comes to politics and blind hatred for others who do not share their world view.
I do not see how this nation recovers from the bone cancer that has set in, and the damage that is being done to our collective soul. It would take a superhuman effort by a lot of people who are by no means super. I won't be holding my breath waiting for that to happen.
Trump being focused on how business leaders can benefit him is, sadly, completely predictable.
That type of pay to play corruption, and the intertwining of government and business is one of the characteristics of a nation falling into fascism. In fact, according to political scientist, Lawrence Britt’s work on the 14 characteristics, it’s the 13th.
On Katie Miller, it’s just disgusting that she uses people when she needs them. Then discards them when it, to paraphrase what she said, “aggrandizes herself.” It’s possible the brain and cognitive dissonance got to her. It also equally likely that she’s projecting what she’s doing on to Fauci.
Also because there may be a more appropriately creepy word for the product of their unholy union, but neither of us could come up with it in the moment.
I've barely been able to engage with the egregious treatment of Fauci this week. I work in health care and it genuinely makes me too angry. But the Katie Miller of it all is too horrible not to address. I've sometimes wondered how any woman married the Trump admin's version of Goebbels. Now I understand. To turn on the person who comforted her when she was pregnant and terrified, to humiliate him in front of the American public...it's psychotic. She's psychotic. She and her husband are both completely psychotic and proud of it.
Didn’t Katie Miller once say that liberal men are not attractive, while she is happily married to a Nosferatu lookalike? Now Stephen Miller explained that liberals are both ugly and violent inside and out. It really does feel as if we are living in a totalitarian nightmare. I have a vague recollection that even some top Nazis protected their own Jewish doctors. The circle seems to keep turning those who opposed the fictive death panels have turned out to be the haters of humanity.
In MAGA world, every accusation is a confession. Katie Miller undoubtedly used her conversations with Fauci to aggrandize herself, likely reporting to everyone in her social circle that she had the world's foremost expert on the COVID-19 pandemic personally overseeing her care. It's impossible to imagine that the reverse was true, that Fauci was bragging to his friends and colleagues that he was personally overseeing the care of some junior veep staffer.
Keep in mind that the interactions between K Miller and Fauci were at first redacted. I don't know the details of who did the unredacting, but it wasn't Ron Paul - he preferred to keep them out of the public eye (for some reason...).
It's all very middle school drama isn't it? The cool girl befriends the nerd in secret, but when the nerd tries to approach the cool girl at school, she berates him and says their friendship was a lie. What a dumb timeline we live in where those in power are stuck in 13 year old mindsets...
It's refreshing to see various MAGA personalities like Crowder *finally* drop the pretense and make the explicit case for fascism. Dude, we knew you wanted it all along.
A debate between Wisconsin governor candidates might be interesting viewing this fall. It's hard to see how they would agree on anything...except to have the debate.
Andrew was much nicer to Katie Miller than I would have been. I am beginning to have quite the distaste for rightwing women like Miller and Erika Kirk who hide behind their husbands, like good little trad wives, and then branch out into the influencer swamp for their own ego and checking accounts. Narcissism is not just a male trait Katie. Look in the freaking mirror.
How does one "weaponize" a pregnancy? She is just as sick as her husband.
And while she has positioned herself as an influencer on social media, Fauci has largely retired from public life and last I heard, was spending a few hours a month teaching. So, who is weaponizing what? And who is self-aggrandizing?
Psychopaths find and marry each other. Case in point: Donald and Melania
I was thinking about how stressful it must be to live like that where everything, even your personal life, has to be strategized and messaged and it's such an aggressively nasty way. I tend to think that people who live with so much stress often end up getting sick if not now then later in life has it all accumulates. But you're right, please don't seem to be people who feel empathy or self-reflect in a way that allows for shame of any kind. One of the things that upsets me the most is that these people won't even have a sort of internal moral reckoning when this is all over and they're sick enough to go about their lives believing they did what was good and right. Ick.
And this is what they will teach their kids.
Yeah that's another excellent point and something I've been thinking about. Do you remember 10 years ago when all this started whenever there be a new Trumpian character (and Trump himself of course) we would be like, "oh that poor guy's wife," or "oh that kid must be so embarrassed," only to learn that the entire family it's just a awful as their most public facing member?
Time will tell with these kids, but they will be surrounded by such thinkers. Their minds will be blown should they ever leave the compound.
Actually it may be that the strategizing and messaging comes as naturally as breathing for certain personality types. A drive to dominate whoever and whatever is around a person plus the combined senses of superiority and grievance is what it takes to behave that way.
When you’re morally bankrupt and lack a soul—it’s easy…:)
[Sarcasm Alert]
Well, demon that he is, Fauci kept a diary 6 years ago knowing that he could "weaponize" it against the Millers sometime in the future.
[End Sarcasm Alert}
I think Katie Miller herself shows how it's done...
Another confession portrayed as an accusation I guess.
Was wondering the same thing.
Have you seen her man's teeth? He's literally rotting from the inside.
Holy holy shit! Katie Miller! What evil planet did these people arrive from? I’ve followed Fauci’s career since the 80s when he emerged as a shining star in the fight against AIDS. He is truly a great man in the purest sense — devoted to science, truth, and helping humanity.
Apparently that’s now a grave offense in itself. Is this also because he worked to cure AIDS, which the far right sees as God’s punishment for homosexuality?
There is no bottom to the evil we are seeing.
Truly the Millers are the worst of the worst. They would have fit in great with the Nazi elites. They deserve whatever karma has in store for them.
It isn’t nice to be mean about the mentally ill, but Katie is an exception!
I think it comes from being terminally online.
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I concur.
I'm sure I'd miss it, but I just realized it's Friday and the week's over! See ya Monday.
> Blanche may still become attorney general in a permanent capacity... That corruption will continue under Blanche or any Trump-appointed successor. So this victory may only be transient, and in any case will be limited in its practical effects.
That's true, but at the same time, blocking this nomination - even temporarily - prevents the administration from moving on to its next destructive project with the same level of energy.
This is why I favor fighting on every front - because every minor monkey-wrench, every delay, every little bit of sand that can be thrown in the gears of the authoritarian machine gives the opposition space to grow.
It perhaps brings the corruption surrounding this particular guy to the forefront of people's attention for a little while at least...Epstein files and slush fund...even those who only worry about the price of gas and food might notice those things if enough noise is made about them.
Whenever I am mad at my parents over something, I have to remind me that I am light years better off than the kids of Stephen and Katie Miller.
Francesca Hong is so far out of the mainstream in WI and the Dems are playing Russian roulette at best if not taking an outright suicide mission that is off target.
And on a more personal level, for those of us living in WI, it is the possibility, even likelihood, of returning to the Scott Walker years and potentially even worse as the GOP falls into line with the President and his irrational whims and behavior. Just when we thought that divide-and-conquer had been buried in the landfill of history, it looks to be alive and healthy after all.
Yeah, unfortunately, I think we can kiss Wisconsin goodbye.
Not necessarily. Polling shows Hong vs. Tiffany is a toss-up among likely voters. And if this is a blue-wave year, Dem's will win more toss-ups than they'll lose.
https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/elections/2026/07/29/hong-expands-lead-in-final-marquette-poll-before-aug-11-primary/91076504007/
Sadly, I think you are too optimistic. Charlie Sykes made a good point that there are a lot of conservatives here, disenchanted with the current presidential administration, who might be open to more moderate Democratic candidates, but they absolutely will not vote for Hong. It will be Tiffany as the perceived lesser of two evils.
While I agree with her on certain issues, there is no universe in which the idea of defunding the police and abolishing jails plays well with the overall electorate. Guess what soundbites we already are hearing in political commercials here, with the dark money pouring in to paint her as a political Satan. With that and more played over and over, and set to sink in all the way to November, the outlook is grim if she is the nominee -- too much, too far, too fast, for too many people.
I've seen this play out before, in the Tea Party days. Remember "I'm not a witch"? It saved the Dems bacon then. Looks like Dems are succumbing to the same fever swamp dreams as the Tea Party did and have decided to nominate extreme candidates, consequences be damned.
Yes. They are falling in love with what they see in their own mirror, which almost always is a bad thing in a world that sees the warts that they don't want to acknowledge are there.
Tiffany is still the greater of 2 evils. Since conservatives swallow conservative propaganda hook, line, and sinker, they're easily convinced to vote against theirs and the state's best interests. WI still has a legislature, correct? I can't see either Dem or magat state senators and reps allowing her to defund the police 100%. BTW Thanksgiving is a Federal holiday. She can't do shit about abolishing it. Conservatives are too intellectually lazy to understand that.
Agreed about where the true evil lies. But the problem is that perception becomes reality, and Hong's own unguarded words from years ago will be used against her now as the right and its supporters increasingly shape the narrative. I've been asking for a while now how she could get her agenda through a GOP-controlled state House and Senate -- it isn't going to happen. So the liberal wish list is destined to stay merely that, whereas a more moderate candidate likely could effect more change, and with less divisiveness.
I get it why the far left likes her candidacy, and that she is a fresh face, but the reality is that both of those things work against her when the whole electorate is considered, not just those on the left who believe in themselves and their purpose. The far left needs to do a better job of counting the votes ahead of time, reading the room, and understanding that they have to play the long game rather than putting all of their eggs into this particular basket. The consequences of failure right now are simply too profound and too far-reaching to justify such an extraordinary gamble on their part.
Right, but look at all the chaos that the 6 DSA city council members has created in Portland.
The message from them is that Portland is "closed for business". They tried to strip money out of the budget (secretly, I might add) that was geared toward bringing in new businesses and jobs. All this as the tax base shrinks and folks move to Clackamas county. PDX was rated the second worst metro for multi-family housing investments in the USA. That means rents are falling. Everyone wants their individual rent to go down but collectively, as a city, when that happens, it means terrible economic news is driving it. Just like deflation.
It doesn't matter if she wants to defund the police or not: the governor sets the message for the entire state.
I'm not sure they are intellectually lazy. I think they just believe that the head of a government ,whether it's the governor or the president, calls all the shots and makes all the decisions...like the CEO or owner of a business does. It's why authoritarianism feels natural to them.
Instead of focusing on sound bites- Hong is an actual elected state rep from Madison (damn those college towns with smart people), with a track record in office. A strong advocate for economic and environmental justice, there is a reason she cleared a crowded field. I’m interested in what Ben Wikler has to say, with no shortage of opportunities on his current book tour.
Unfortunately, the failure of the Dem establishment to define any effective means of opposition to the Felonious Menace has enabled the party's leftists and the DSA in particular to harness the public anger of the moment to their ambitions. It's almost like the Tea Party takeover of Republican politics in 2010, which later birthed the Menace. The worst thing is that their rise comes at exactly the time when their platform can do the most damage, by limiting the rejection of the fascist MAGA crowd. If they prevail in primaries and lose in general elections, that will be a strong indictment of party leadership for lethargy and fiddling while Rome burned.
Hong is out of the mainstream? Have you not paid attention to the far right governors in Texas and Florida?
Can you please explain your logic here? Is is that FL/TX are so far right that it moves everyone else on the far left to the middle? To me, that makes zero sense. "mainstream" would be proposing policies supported by, say, 60% or more of the population.
That doesn't mean one can't get elected by being out of that segment, due to our extremly warped primary system, but in a functioning system that wasn't party-based, one of either Hong or Tiffany would not be the nominee as a "top 2" system where many were voting in the primary would not nominate 2 extremists as the top 2 vote getters.
This latest Fauci obsession on the right is so obviously another "Look, squirrel!" deflection on their part to change the subject away from all else that we really need to be discussing -- the lousy economy, the Trump War, Epstein, ICE out of control, presidential grift and corruption, and so much more of the curriculum vitae of failure that is the achievement list of this administration over its first year and a half.
That is bad. Worse still is 1) how low they will go, the depth to which they will sink in the slime pit, to smear and destroy anyone who stands in the way of their total grasp of power and lack of accountability for any and all mistakes that they are making. And 2) how so many seemingly rational, reasonable, sane people otherwise in everyday life can be so sickly twisted and manipulated when it comes to politics and blind hatred for others who do not share their world view.
I do not see how this nation recovers from the bone cancer that has set in, and the damage that is being done to our collective soul. It would take a superhuman effort by a lot of people who are by no means super. I won't be holding my breath waiting for that to happen.
This exactly what happened in Nazi Germany. It took WW2 the root out that cancer.
WWII, complete defeat, and occupying forces, and still there was remnants of the cancer in the body that still flares up 70+ years later.
This isn't really fixable, and what new stasis settles in, it will probably be after I shuffle off my mortal coil (20ish years if I am lucky).
The pendulum with MAGA still has a few swings before durable change can happen.
Trump being focused on how business leaders can benefit him is, sadly, completely predictable.
That type of pay to play corruption, and the intertwining of government and business is one of the characteristics of a nation falling into fascism. In fact, according to political scientist, Lawrence Britt’s work on the 14 characteristics, it’s the 13th.
On Katie Miller, it’s just disgusting that she uses people when she needs them. Then discards them when it, to paraphrase what she said, “aggrandizes herself.” It’s possible the brain and cognitive dissonance got to her. It also equally likely that she’s projecting what she’s doing on to Fauci.
We have truly put the worst people into power.
I feel sorry for the Miller spawn. I sincerely hope they do not become bent, twisted little creatures like their parents.
It's possible that we both typed "spawn" at exactly the same time.
Because neither of us can imagine them having cuddly babies.
Also because there may be a more appropriately creepy word for the product of their unholy union, but neither of us could come up with it in the moment.
More like Rosemary’s baby!
Also reminds me of this movie too...
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071675/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_7_nm_1_in_0_q_it%27s%20alive
The story of Katie Miller tells all we need to know about Trump's circle. They are vile.
I've barely been able to engage with the egregious treatment of Fauci this week. I work in health care and it genuinely makes me too angry. But the Katie Miller of it all is too horrible not to address. I've sometimes wondered how any woman married the Trump admin's version of Goebbels. Now I understand. To turn on the person who comforted her when she was pregnant and terrified, to humiliate him in front of the American public...it's psychotic. She's psychotic. She and her husband are both completely psychotic and proud of it.
And The Millers are Trump’s Rasputin. Hopefully they end the same way.
"How does one 'weaponize' a pregnancy?" Give birth to Stephen and Katie Miller's spawn.
Didn’t Katie Miller once say that liberal men are not attractive, while she is happily married to a Nosferatu lookalike? Now Stephen Miller explained that liberals are both ugly and violent inside and out. It really does feel as if we are living in a totalitarian nightmare. I have a vague recollection that even some top Nazis protected their own Jewish doctors. The circle seems to keep turning those who opposed the fictive death panels have turned out to be the haters of humanity.
Clearly, their taxpayer funded military mansion didn't come with mirrors.
They had to remove them (along with anything in the kitchen containing garlic) before Nosferatu and Vampira moved in.
In MAGA world, every accusation is a confession. Katie Miller undoubtedly used her conversations with Fauci to aggrandize herself, likely reporting to everyone in her social circle that she had the world's foremost expert on the COVID-19 pandemic personally overseeing her care. It's impossible to imagine that the reverse was true, that Fauci was bragging to his friends and colleagues that he was personally overseeing the care of some junior veep staffer.
Keep in mind that the interactions between K Miller and Fauci were at first redacted. I don't know the details of who did the unredacting, but it wasn't Ron Paul - he preferred to keep them out of the public eye (for some reason...).
It's all very middle school drama isn't it? The cool girl befriends the nerd in secret, but when the nerd tries to approach the cool girl at school, she berates him and says their friendship was a lie. What a dumb timeline we live in where those in power are stuck in 13 year old mindsets...
Junior high cafeteria is exactly the level of maturity shown by the main players in the Trump admin.
Are you saying the “nerd” in this scenario was Dr Fauci, who at around that time was being played by Brad Pitt on SNL? 🤣
It's refreshing to see various MAGA personalities like Crowder *finally* drop the pretense and make the explicit case for fascism. Dude, we knew you wanted it all along.
A debate between Wisconsin governor candidates might be interesting viewing this fall. It's hard to see how they would agree on anything...except to have the debate.
Andrew was much nicer to Katie Miller than I would have been. I am beginning to have quite the distaste for rightwing women like Miller and Erika Kirk who hide behind their husbands, like good little trad wives, and then branch out into the influencer swamp for their own ego and checking accounts. Narcissism is not just a male trait Katie. Look in the freaking mirror.