Welcome to TechCrunch Crypto. Here’s the biggest news this week: bitcoin’s price jumped and Coinbase’s app crashed, Telegram rolled out a plan to pay out rewards using toncoin and more.
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Who knew that anyone on Fox is actually interested in what happened to working families after the COVID relief funds for child care expired last fall. Of course, Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy couldn't bother to point out who the actual culprit is. During a segment that aired this Wednesday morning, here's how Doocy started an interview with a woman who runs a day care center out of her home in Arkansas.
DOOCY: It has been five moths since COVID federal funding ended for child care, and many child care providers are now fighting just to stay afloat. Our next guest says after all her bills are paid, she barely breaks even.
[…]
I'm sure you were disappointed last September when Congress didn't say, okay, child care in this country, it is a priority. We're going to figure a way to pay for it, but they didn't. And so now your industry is on the brink.
"Congress." Sorry Steve, but the word you're looking for is "Republicans."
As Vox explained last September: A program that saved child care for millions is expiring. What now?
This weekend, parents and child care providers across the nation are bracing for the end of an instrumental federal program that has stabilized child care programs and reduced costs for families over the past three years.
from Latest articles from Crooks and Liars
via Click me for Details
Rep. James Comer (R-KY) clashed with a reporter who was not buying his claim that President Joe Biden was involved in an "influence peddling" scheme.
As the president's son, Hunter, was giving a deposition behind closed doors on Wednesday, Comer spoke to reporters at the Capitol.
"We have evidence that Joe Biden met with the Chinese officials," Comer said as one reporter asked for proof that the current president helped a Chinese health care company.
"You mentioned AmeriCorps Health," Comer observed. "Does anyone in here question whether or not that was influence peddling? Does anyone question that?"
"I question that because there was no evidence that Joe Biden did anything," the reporter replied.
"He got $200,000 from it," Comer argued. "Look, you can defend Joe Biden all day long. You can defend Joe Biden. You can be on his legal defense team, Kevin Morris will probably pay your legal bills if you want."
"You're not answering my question," the reporter pointed out.
"Joe Biden took $200,000 directly from AmeriCorps Health," Comer repeated.
"Then what?" the reporter wondered. "He was a private citizen at the time of the $200,000 check."
"So do you have a problem that Joe Biden's lied about this?" an exasperated Comer shot back. "Do you have a problem that AmeriCorps Health hooked investors?"
ALSO READ: Parents of '2119' Nazi teens haunted by fear and regret
"I'm asking you, what specific action did he take as a public official, an elected public official?" the reporter pressed.
Rubin joined retired federal appeals court Judge Michael Luttig to discuss with Nicolle Wallace the shocking news that the U.S. Supreme Court granted Trump’s request to consider his claim of presidential immunity. As CNN legal analyst Joan Biskupic put it, the decision made the court “a partner” in Trump’s effort to run the clock and seriously jeopardize any chance of a trial before the election.
Luttig issued a grave warning:
America fought one revolution almost 250 years ago in order that there would never be another revolution. And the Constitution prescribes that there will not be another revolution. But the intellectual underpinnings of the MAGA movement, the intellectual underpinnings, sound literally in revolution. And they compare what they are about, those people, to the revolution that we had in 1776. That is what's at issue in the next nine months.
Rubin got the last word. Her voice sounding as if it were about to break, she talked about “watching a building that I love” get “plundered” on January 6, 2021. “I think about what the judge is saying now and the intellectual underpinnings of the MAGA movement, and thinking about what that could look like, and I am beyond terrified, Nicolle, right now, for our country.”
Apple CEO Tim Cook is promising that Apple will “break new ground” on GenAI this year. Cook made the pronouncement during the company’s annual shareholders meeting today, which came in the same week the company reportedly scuttled its multibillion-dollar, decade-long plan to build an EV. Some of the staff on the EV project were reassigned […]
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Emerging decentralized social network and X rival Bluesky has just landed a notable former Twitter leader as its new Head of Trust and Safety. On Wednesday, the company announced it has appointed Aaron Rodericks, who most recently co-led the Trust and Safety team at Twitter, to this new position. Though typically leaders below the C-Suite […]
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Just let this guy keep talking and maybe Trump could hire him as a spokesperson for his campaign. The Biden campaign might even chip in for some of his salary if Republicans think this sort of crap is a winning message for November.
For anyone not already familiar with this clown, Michael Knowles is a MAGA podcaster for The Daily Wire who has defended book bans, wants to ban "transgenderism" entirely, and called for it to be "eradicated," wants to outlaw the "evil" pride flag, fantasizes about having Trump as a Chief Justice, defends blackface, wants the taxpayers to foot Trump's legal bills, and just attacked gay marriage at this year's CPAC.
Ethiopian startup eQub won the fintech pitching battle at 4YFN 2024, the startup event of Mobile World Congress.
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On Real America's Voice, Missouri Republican Rep. Mike Davis said something that won't shock anyone. The Republican Party doesn't exist anymore. It's the Trump Party now. Even the RNC will be turned over to Lara Trump, so her father-in-law has new territory for looting purposes. Most of us suspected that Trump would destroy his own party, but the amount of willing participants is rather bizarre. Davis said that people in Trump's next administration need to be loyal above anything else -- even competence.
Co-host Natalie Winters asked, "Mike Davis, do you want to add anything?"
"I actually worked on political appointments in a prior Republican administration, and it's critically important," Davis said. "We have about 3,000 political appointees who are supposed to run an executive branch with, you know, nearly 3 million people, so we're outnumbered about 1,000 to 1, and if you get the wrong political appointees in these 3,000 slots, you're going to lose entire swaths of the executive branch. So it's critically important."
Here it comes.
"You need two things to be a political appointee of a president. You need to be both competent, and you have to be loyal," he added. "You have to be both; you can't be one or the other. You have to have both. That is what's going to be so important in this next administration is to get people who are both competent and, more importantly loyal in these jobs."
It feels like there's a trickle from the dam that's picking up momentum. Republicans are opposing Trump -- if not his candidacy, his decrees on every procedural thing. Like this mail-in ballot plan in Pennsylvania. Via Reuters:
PHILADELPHIA, Feb 23 (Reuters) - Pennsylvania Republican leaders are trying to raise millions of dollars to convince state voters to embrace mail-in ballots and to ignore criticism from their party's likely presidential candidate, Donald Trump, over the practice.
The previously unreported effort puts Republican leadership in Pennsylvania, one of the most important battleground states in the 2024 presidential race, at odds with Trump over 'absentee' or mail-in balloting.
Trump, who continues to falsely allege he won the 2020 race, said this week "you automatically have fraud" when mail-in voting systems are used. The remarks are Trump's latest in years of allegations, without evidence, that mail-in ballots make election results unreliable.
A small group of Pennsylvania Republicans are hoping to raise some $8 million to fund an education campaign in the state aimed at soothing Republican voters' concerns about the integrity of casting ballots by mail, officials told Reuters. The money will fund staff to knock on doors in a personal persuasion campaign, officials said.
TechCrunch Mobility is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click TechCrunch Mobility — to receive the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. Subscribe for free. Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares and I covered […]
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As humans spend increasing amounts of time indoors, we lose access to the sun’s natural benefits. Recognition of season affective disorder has grown accordingly. While the actual occurrence of the condition is low (around 5% — or 10 million or so Americans), it’s led to increasing awareness of the sun’s impact on the production of […]
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I don't think someone who is banging Kimberly Guilfoyle gets a say about another person's sex life. The individual who is obsessing over President Joe Biden's sex life has a father who was found liable for sexual abuse. Donald Trump Jr's father is a rapist, and Junior woke up thinking about Biden's dick. I'm just glad the President has security.
The bedwetting human 8-Ball was responding to a Daily Mail link saying that Biden says the "key to his marriage is 'good sex.'" The entire Trump clan, except Barron, is completely fucked up.
"There's literally no amount of Viagra on earth that's going to give Joe Biden (who can barely walk without falling over) wood," he posted on X. "Just stop! The more desperate they become trying to make him seem young and vibrant the more obvious it is to everyone that he's not up to any task!"
Dude, your dad is nearly the same age as Biden.
X users took a few shots at 8-Ball.
As a part of a multi-part series, TechCrunch is highlighting women innovators — from academics to policymakers — in the field of AI.
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These fundies are exhausting. Someone needs to sue the judge in Alabama for violating the rights of everyone who isn't a Dominionist or Southern Baptist. They're working hard to make it a state religion.
At any rate, this cartoon captures the Holy Trinity of Aladamnbama well. It is your Sunday cartoon and open thread. What's catching your eye this morning?
- Karoli
Billy Joel's last came out with a new song about three decades ago. That was until this month, when Joel released the oh so appropriately named "Turn The Lights Back On."
Shortly after the release of the song, he released the first official video for the song. Much like the Rolling Stones latest release, the video uses AI technology to show Joel through the ages singing the song. The video starts out with Joel flipping through a pad of paper that had the lyrics of "Famous Last Words," the last track of his last album.
The biggest surprise is that Joel did not actually write the song. It was written by Freddy Wexler. But after a lot of leg work by Wexler's wife, she managed to arrange a meeting between the two songwriters. When Joel saw Wexler's song, it sparked the flame anew and the rest, as they say is history. But if you listen to the words without knowing who actually did write it, one could swear it was all Joel. It just matches his style so perfectly.
I have been a Joel fan for my whole life. The best concert I saw was Joel and Elton John touring together in the late 1990s. So with the imagery of the video, the impact of the words and the soul returning to Joel's voice, it took me back through time as well as a smile to my face and, yes, maybe a tiny tear to my eye. I hope you enjoy as much as I do.
Welcome, folks, to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter covering noteworthy happenings in the tech industry. This week, Google launched two new open large language models, Gemma 2B and Gemma 7B, in its continued bid for generative AI dominance. The company, which describes the LLMs as “inspired by Gemini,” its flagship family of GenAI […]
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The Browser company’s Arc, a browser focused on a less cluttered web experience, launched a new feature in its mobile app Arc Search that uses AI to summarize web pages. The feature involves a clever “pinching” gesture that shows a neatly formatted summary with main points. The feature has gotten attention because it presents a […]
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With a government shutdown looming, 13 Republican senators, led by Utah Sen. Mike Lee and Texas’ pretend cowboy Sen. Ted Cruz, released a letter they said they sent to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell demanding he make a big stink about holding an impeachment trial for Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Lee even posted a copy of the letter with some vaguely legible signatures to his X (formerly Twitter) account. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is expected to dismiss the bogus bit of political theater.
Social network Bluesky, a competitor to X, Threads, Mastodon, and others, is opening up its doors with today’s news that the network is now opening up federation, following its public launch earlier this month. The move will allow anyone to run their own server that connects to Bluesky’s network, so they can host their own […]
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The CEO of meditation app Insight Timer, Christopher Plowman, is frustrated. He doesn’t think the teachers who leverage his app’s marketplace to reach their students should have to share 30% of their income with Apple — its commission on in-app purchases — and for the past 12 months, Apple had also agreed. After Apple loosened […]
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Trump-endorsed Senate candidate Bernie Moreno has some thoughts about abortion, and they're as absurd as you can imagine. Once Trump made the way to overturn Roe, conservatives started clamoring for more regulations over women's bodies. I think they should all just shut the fuck up. To highlight why I believe that, meet Moreno, who feels that if men helped women put strollers in the overhead bin on a plane, they wouldn't need abortions. Problem solved! Again, men should not have a seat at the table when discussing what I and other women can do with our bodies.
"What changes would you support regarding reproductive rights or abortion as a U.S. Senator?" Moreno, a businessman, was asked.
"My daughter just took a flight to go back home to where she lives," the Republican candidate said. You know, Mom is carrying what looks like an F-1 team's worth of equipment."
"People helped her on that plane," he continued. "Helped put the stroller away, helped her with her seat, gave up her seat."
"Those are the kinds of things that we can do," he added. "Let's be a pro-mom, pro-family policy."
Wellll, first of all, he's a big lying liar because strollers, to my knowledge, aren't allowed on planes. This guy wants a national abortion ban, ladies. In other words, Mr. Liar Pants wants to drag us back a few years. Keep talking, Republicans. That sound you hear is you digging your party's grave. I can list some "pro-mom" policies Republicans should support to be "pro-family," but they've already snubbed them. Controlling assholes.
Republican Presidential hopeful Nikki Haley tore into Donald Trump, describing him as 'unstable and unhinged." Haley is a little late to the party, but she's not playing footsie with the former President like Vivek Ramaswamy does. Haley brought up some excellent points about the former President.
"It's not normal to insult our military heroes and veterans," she said. "It's not normal to spend $50 million in campaign contributions on personal court cases."
"It's not normal to threaten people who back your opponent," she continued while clearly running out of fucks to give. "And it's not normal to call on Russia to invade NATO countries. Donald Trump has done all of that and more in just the past month."
"Look, I've said it many times," Haley said. "I think Donald Trump was the right President at the right time. But times change. And so has Trump. He's gotten more unstable and unhinged."
"He spends more time in courtrooms than he does on the campaign trail," she added. "He refuses to debate. He's completely distracted. And everything is about him. He's so obsessed with his own demons from the past that he can't focus on delivering the future Americans deserve."
She wasn't done. Haley isn't going to let Trump blame the pandemic for the national debt:
The potential sale of MariaDB to K1 Investment Management for $37 million is a capstone on the failed era of SPAC mergers.
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Twice-impeached, four times indicted, former President Donald Trump compared himself to Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny after his BFF Vladimir Putin had his critic murdered. After playing footsie with Putin for years, Trump remained silent about Navalny's death until now. Trump called it a "sudden death" on Truth Social, even though Putin has been trying to have Navalny killed for years.
That's just Trump buying into Russian propaganda again, though. The penal colony where Navalny was being held told the Opposition Leader's mother that he died from "sudden death syndrome."
It's all about him:
"The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country," Trump wrote. "It is a slow, steady progression, with CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction. Open Borders, Rigged Elections, and Grossly Unfair Courtroom Decisions are DESTROYING AMERICA. WE ARE A NATION IN DECLINE, A FAILING NATION! MAGA2024."
Donald Trump appears to have found a new product to sell to his marks - ugly sneakers. I wish I was joking, but I am not. Fabric mid-rise kicks will run you $199. The high bling, gold high tops will run you $399.
The attendees at Sneakercon did not seem very receptive to Donald Trump, as you can see in the clip. He was booed heavily. Considering he showed up in a stupid suit and red tie, his uniform because I think he can't actually dress himself, is not really the vibe for a sneaker conference filled with teens and 20-somethings who are focused on trends and cool clothes. This guy walks in like an aging grandpa.
Here are the shoes, since I know that is what you really want to see:
This photo cracks me up for some reason:
It’s every parent’s worst nightmare. Earlier this week, the 19-year-old son of former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, was found dead at UC Berkeley of an apparent drug overdose, according to his grandmother, Esther Wojcicki. The news broke widely yesterday, though Wojcicki posted the news to Facebook several days ago, writing: “Tragedy hit my family yesterday. […]
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Few categories are as ripe for automation-fueled disruption as construction. The industry is valued at around $2 trillion a year, in the U.S. alone. Much of that work is strenuous, repetitive and sometimes dangerous — precisely the sorts of problems industrial robotics are built to solve. The other thing construction brings is a wide range […]
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Welcome, folks, to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter covering noteworthy happenings in the tech industry. This week, OpenAI stunned the blogosphere with the release of Sora, a new AI model that can generate videos in impressively high fidelity. We’ve seen video generators before. But what makes Sora unique is its understanding of time […]
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On Sunday's 60 Minutes, they will be showing an interview between Anderson Cooper and Andrew Hitt, the former chair of the Republican Party of Wisconsin (RPS) and one of Wisconsin's ten fake electors. During the interview, Hitt tells Anderson that he went along with the scheme because he was afraid for his safety and the safety of his family:
ANDREW HITT: Can you imagine the repurcussions on myself, my family, if it was me, Andrew Hitt, who prevented Donald Trump from winning Wisconsin?
ANDERSON COOPER: You say you were scared.
AH: Absolutely.
AC: Scared of Trump Supporters in your state?
AH: It was not a safe time. If my lawyer's right, and the whole reason Trump loses Wisconsin is because of me, I would be scared to death.
It should be noted that this is the second time Hitt had stated he was scared. He had originally told the January 6 Committee that he was scared. However, that time he was afraid of protesters trying to impede their misdeeds.
Hitt has also used two other excuses for his participation scheme. One was because they just wanted to comply with requests from the Trump campaign and the RPW - of which Hitt was chair at the time.
The other excuse came out two months ago, when Hitt went on a Wisconsin show and said that Trump's lawyers and tricked them into doing it. As I pointed out then, that excuse didn't hold water and for the same reasons his other excuses don't hold up:
Don Jr. isn't very bright.
So when it turns out the FBI informant that everyone in TrumpWorld and the GOP was touting as THE lynchpin that would blow the cover off of all the BRIBES Joe Biden was taking Burisma Burisma Burisma...
Burisma is a foreign-sounding word with 3 syllables like Benghazi and Solyndra. Good brainwashing words for Fox News viewers. Fox Aired 1,098 Evening Segments In First 20 Mos on Benghazi After WE WERE ATTACKED there. No indictments, no official charges. Just House GOP BS for Fox
— Frances Langum (@bluegal) July 25, 2023
As Chris Hayes pointed out on Thursday night, Hannity alone did 85 segments on the now-arrested informant.
The San Francisco Giants said goodbye this week to a uniform patch that advertised Cruise and its robotaxis — the latest fallout for the GM self-driving subsidiary and its controversial presence in the city. The marketing partnership, which was announced in August 2023, will continue, but with another GM brand. For the 2024 baseball season, […]
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Welcome to TechCrunch Crypto, formerly known as Chain Reaction. This is our fifth edition with of course, regularly scheduled news bits, but also some recurring segments and features.
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Well, it turns out it’s not a bug that broke iPhone web apps, also known as Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), in the EU. Following developer complaints and press reports about how PWAs were no longer functional in the EU after installing the most recent iOS betas, Apple has updated its website to explain why. No […]
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Meta is in hot water after announcing plans to remove politics from its recommendations across Instagram and Threads, its new Twitter-like app for text-based posts. That leaves a window of opportunity for the startup Bluesky, whose CEO Jay Graber recently explained that Meta’s decision is emblematic of the types of problems that could emerge when […]
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It’s easy to lose track of the fact that robotics is as much a software problem as a hardware one. The programming understandably gets overshadowed by the alure of mechatronics, but without the proper software solution, you’ve got little more on your hands than an expensive paper weight. The road to widespread robotics adoption is […]
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From primary challenges to getting blackballed from House Republicans caucuses, the eight Republicans who ousted former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy are feeling the blowback. His allies—and he has many of them—are making sure of that.
The Republican Main Street Caucus and Republican Governance Group have quietly booted Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, whose attention-getting stunts seem to be wearing thin with her colleagues. “She really wants to be a caucus of one. So we obliged her,” one House Republican told CNN.
The fediverse just got a little bigger today as Flipboard has now launched over 1,000 of its social magazines across the decentralized social web, allowing its curators and publishers to reach new audiences. The news follows the magazine app’s December announcement that it would begin to integrate directly with the fediverse, or the decentralized social […]
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The Republican obsession with singing superstar Taylor Swift continues. It's not too surprising since controlling women is like a pastime for conservatives. A Fox News panel has had it with the "insufferable" couple. Travis Kelce isn't making many friends in the right-wing media, and I'm sure he doesn't care after his team was victorious on Super Bowl night. And hey, that was a great game, but conservatives are pretty quiet online lately about the Chiefs' big win.
Fox News contributor Lisa Boothe was mad at Swift for (checks notes) drinking beer.
"I find Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce insufferable, from the beer chugging thing from Taylor Swift — cool, everyone can do it, it's not that hard, Taylor, we've all done it, from chugging a beer — to Travis Kelce knocking his coach over with his chest in his violent bit of rage," she said. "Taylor, you should break up with him; he's got issues. I find the two of them insufferable. I wish they weren't a part of the whole thing, and then I could have enjoyed the Super Bowl more."
Co-host Harris Faulkner was equally outraged over Swift having the audacity to drink a beer.
"But you're right, I'm not going to argue with you, when she was chugging beer, and you've got kids in the room, and she's slamming it down, I did question, you know, what do we really know about this 34-year-old woman, and does she realize how young her audience is?" Faulkner asked. "Or does it not matter?"
Narrator: It doesn't matter what you think of her, you weirdo.
The question of where AI sits in the legal personhood stack isn’t as simple as it may seem (i.e. “nowhere”) — but the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office today declared that, as with other intellectual property, only a person can receive its official protections. The news arrived via “guidance,” which is to say official policy […]
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Only 7% of founders have a pitch deck with a reasonably good go-to-market (GTM) narrative. Given that a lot of founders are raising money to acquire new customers, allow me to put words to what that means: It’s an absolute embarrassment. The vast majority of slide decks barely qualify to be called even a coherent […]
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Get ready for an exciting lineup at TechCrunch Early Stage — happening on April 25 in the lively city of Boston, Massachusetts. We’ve gone through a bunch of applications from experienced founders and experts in the startup world, all hoping to shine in our Audience Choice segment. Don’t miss out: Grab your tickets at a […]
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Crockett got to what is really at the heart of the 2024 presidential election: sanity. While Biden has always been a gaffe machine, sexual predator and Hitler channeler Trump is playing footsie with Russia to the point of saying he’d abandon NATO and possibly encourage Russia to attack a NATO country.
In other words, there shouldn’t even be any question as to which man is qualified to be president.
CROCKETT: Listen, this is absolutely ridiculous that we're even talking about the candidacy of a Donald Trump, someone who we know was always playing around with Russia, someone who encouraged the interference with our domestic elections in the first place. And the fact that he has not learned his lesson from losing his election, from his very ridiculous and dangerous rhetoric, tells us everything that we need to know.
I truly don't understand how and why anyone can see that this guy is a viable candidate. We are talking about someone that literally may start World War Three. It is just that deep. So, for everyone that thinks that they are now an expert in foreign policy, I need you to look up what happens when we don't do what we're supposed to do for our NATO countries. If you're going to be a foreign policy expert. Don't just be an expert in the Middle East. Become an expert in all of foreign policy and understand how dangerous this guy is.
Hear, hear.
