State of the Union Address - March 7, 2024

[bill_g]

https: //twitter.com/i/status/1720927778155995512

https: //www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/katie-b ... r-BB1jzakt

Wow. Learn something new everyday. Fundie baby voice. Never knew about it, and yet I've heard it a number of times.

Mama Dugger big time

I totally forgot about them. Thx.

[pipistrelle]

This is what I was thinking about it.

I just showed this video to my husband of 33 years. After he was done cringing, his reaction was: "Any man who wants his wife to sound like a 13-year-old girl probably wishes that she was a 13-year-old girl."
I couldn't help but think of how Republicans in some states have tried to lower the legal age for marriage.

[AndyinPA]

https://www.thedailybeast.com/sex-traff ... -was-bogus

A sex trafficking survivor slammed Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL) after the lawmaker inaccurately used her story in a response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address as part of an attack on his border policies.

Britt’s communications director confirmed that Britt was talking about Karla Jacinto Romero, a woman who has previously testified before Congress about being forced to work in brothels in Mexico 20 years ago. Speaking to CNN, Romero said no one from Britt’s camp or anywhere else contacted her asking for permission to use her story in the GOP’s SOTU response, and she also confirmed allegations from a viral TikTok video that Britt’s telling of that story was, at best, completely misleading.

In an interview Sunday, CNN’s Rafael Romo asked Romero if she felt her story had been used for “political purposes” in the U.S. “Yes,” Romero, speaking from Mexico City, said in response. “In fact I hardly ever cooperate with politicians because it seems to me that they only want an image. They only want a photo, and that to me is not fair.”

“I work as a spokesperson for many victims who have no voice, and I really would like them to be empathetic—all the governors, all the senators—to be empathetic with the issue of human trafficking, because there are millions of girls and boys who disappear all the time,” Romero added, according to CNN’s translation of her comments. “People who are really trafficked and abused, as she [Britt] mentioned. And I think she should first take into account what really happens before telling a story of that magnitude.”

Romero also told the network that Sen. Britt got multiple elements of her story wrong. She was trafficked by a pimp who worked to force vulnerable girls into prostitution, Romero said, not Mexican drug cartels. She was also never trafficked inside the U.S.; while Britt did not explicitly say Romero had been trafficked in the U.S., some viewers may have got that impression from the senator’s phrase: “We wouldn’t be OK with this happening in a Third World country; this is the United States of America.”

[p0rtia]

Quoting the last para from above:

Romero also told the network that Sen. Britt got multiple elements of her story wrong. She was trafficked by a pimp who worked to force vulnerable girls into prostitution, Romero said, not Mexican drug cartels. She was also never trafficked inside the U.S.; while Britt did not explicitly say Romero had been trafficked in the U.S., some viewers may have got that impression from the senator’s phrase: “We wouldn’t be OK with this happening in a Third World country; this is the United States of America.”

This is where the otherwise well-written article chickens out. I listened to Britt self-righteously explaining that she was "careful" never to say that this crime took place in the USA, or that it was a result of Biden's policies.

Just. No. When you juxtapose a vignette of any kind with any description of policy, you are tying the two together. It's not a question of "some viewers may have got that impression." The intent of the words was to give viewers that impression. This is what deceptive writing/speaking is all about. The fact that you claim you've covered your ass by leaving out certain linking language is just more deceit. I don't expect "most viewers" to get this, but news editors should. What the above should say is something like:

While Britt's wording avoided the overt lie that Romero was trafficked in the US, this is a rhetorical dodge, and it is clear that she intended her viewers to draw that conclusion.

I hate it when news people, who are language and communications experts just as surely as the lawyers are, play dumb when a politician or anyone else does this. "Some viewers" just sets up readers to think that it was only a foolish few who got the wrong idea.

I've had more than one discussion about whether or not those reprehensible MGA Justices on the SC "lied" about overturning Roe. Of course they lied! What is a lie? I suggest that a lie is intention rather than syntax. Their intention was to deceive while preserving rhetorical loopholes through which they could later squirm.

One of the factoids tucked in the corner of my poor brain in which I preserve the bon mots of my despicable Congresswoman, who has never, ever, acknowledged that Biden was and is our duly and fairly elected president. What she said was, "I congratulate Biden on his inauguration." Cute, isn't is. Preserving that "I never SAID he won!" moment.

[neonzx]

[Suranis]

Only 2k likes? Poor Donnie has fallen hard.