Rightwingers Say the Darnedest Things
"I've decided to "identify" as Chinese. Coke will like me, Delta will agree with my "values" and I'll probably get shoes from Nike & tickets to @MLB games. Ain't America great?"
That was Mike Huckabee's contribution to the conversation this week. Also this week, Fox launched a new show attempting humor. It's embarrassing to watch.
See, this is the problem with conservative humor. I am pretty sure that someone who calls themselves a comedian can book a gig, with a little understanding of the biz, regardless of their political leaning. I don't think agents or venue owners ask you what party you belong to. If you can fill the house, if people will buy tickets and maybe dinner and/or a few drinks, it doesn't matter what you talk about in your act. Controversy is actually a plus, somebody who can make good jokes about something sensitive can do well in comedy.
And yet ... there are no conservative comedians. Yeah, Dennis Miller can spew a stream of impressive-sounding verbiage in a condescending tone of voice, but that's as close as they get. If you haven't seen him, find the Russian propaganda site RT and check him out, he's got a show there. I don't recommend this Fox trainwreck, which I doubt will last. Conservative humor is not humor, it is usually a form of bullying or mocking.
Huckabee put "identify" in quotes, indicating that it is not really a thing. Conservatives think everybody has an identity except themselves. Huckabee for instance does not see himself as "identifying" as a white person, because everybody he associates with is white. He doesn't have to think about it, it's a given, normal people are white, as far as he knows. He doesn't have to "identify" as heterosexual because everybody he knows is straight -- as far as he knows. This is why rightwingers think everybody else is engaging in "identity politics," and not them.
People do identify as something. We live in social units and we know which social units we are part of and which ones we are not part of. We don't decide to "identify" with a group. And yet that is Huckabee's "joke." (By the way, I am enjoying this gratuitous misapplication of quotations marks through my text, following and satirizing his "lead.") Somebody does not decide to identify as Chinese. If your family came from China, or if you came from China, you identify as Chinese. You might not say it that way, you might say "I am Chinese," it's the same thing. That's how it works. You can argue about whether it really matters where somebody's family is from, but basically every single person can tell you what ethnic group they identify with, even if it's some poorly-defined racial category like "white" or "Black" or there is more than one group -- you don't just have one identity. You can be Chinese and American, too. And gay, or straight. You know what kind of person you are.
The dig, "identify" in quotes, is understood by Huckabee's readers as mockery of gay and transgender people. The "joke" is that gay and trans people "choose" to have a gender "identity" or sexual "orientation" that someone like Huckabee doesn't "understand." But identifying does not mean you decide to be something, it means you are something. A trans man does not decide to be a man, he is someone who knows he is a man, the same as other men know what they are. You don't decide to identify as straight or gay, you might choose to conceal the truth but you know who you are.
Huckabee's statement not only reveals that he 1.does not have a sense of humor and 2.doesn't understand what identity is, but by publishing this idiotic comment on Twitter he is announcing that he is coming out as someone who actually identifies as an ignorant person.
The previous president cultivated hatred for Asians, in particular the Chinese, partly to blame them for his failure with the coronavirus pandemic. As a result, America is seeing a wave of random racist violence against Asian people. Many of us would like to see people walking safely on the street and do not think you should have to live in fear because your ancestors came from a certain continent. So we are looking out for our Asian neighbors. Huckabee seems to think this is some kind of special treatment, companies are giving Chinese people special deals, treating them special. Really, we are just looking out for people who are vulnerable through no fault of their own. If a Chinese company is engaging in unfair business practices, then they will be dealt with; Chinese spies will be prosecuted. But your average Asian person walking down the street should feel safe and should know we've got their back.
Huckabee puts "values" in quotes too, and I have to admit I do not know what that's about. I had thought that Republicans claimed "values" as one of their own advertising slogans, remember when they used to call themselves "values voters?" I guess they've canceled that.
And he ends his tweet with "Ain't America great?" The strangeness of this is bottomless. Yes, actually America is pretty great. When somebody is treated unfairly here, Americans rally around them and protect them. We do not like for people to be beaten up on the street simply because they have Asian features, or African features, or do not seem to fit neatly into a simple two-by-two sexual-identity category schema. First of all he sets up a ridiculous proposition, that by claiming to "identify" as Chinese he will be treated differently, which wouldn't happen, partly because he is not Chinese and partly because Chinese people don't get any special treatment. And then says ain't we great? America is supposed to be ironically great for giving Chinese people like him special deals on tennis shoes and baseball tickets.
This is why there are no conservative comedians. This is what they consider to be "funny." Of course part of the joke is that people like me will take the time to respond to it, aka "owning the libs," but I don't care, I think the world deserves to be taken seriously. I do not want my society to degenerate into a bunch of rude people making nihilistic attempts at irony and then laughing because somebody takes it seriously. Irony is fine, it has its place, but you have to know what you believe before you can make fun of it, and I do not believe there is any coherent belief system behind these idiotic words of Huckabee's. What do Huckabee and today's conservatives stand for? Nothing. They stand for white people's values being applied indiscriminately to everyone, not because they are superior values but because they don't know any better.
[Note, 4/9: Fox News' "comedy" show has already been canceled, after three episodes.]
posted by JimK at 6:17 PM
124 Comments:
"Huckabee for instance does not see himself as "identifying" as a white person, because everybody he associates with is white. He doesn't have to think about it, it's a given, normal people are white, as far as he knows. He doesn't have to "identify" as heterosexual because everybody he knows is straight -- as far as he knows."
Huckabee's statement doesn't make any sense but that probably means it's taken out of context. Truth is, no one "identifies" as their race but they do "identify" as homosexual or transgender.
Anyway, the first part of the statement above is false. Like everyone in America, Huckabee knows people of all races, colors, and creeds. It's hard to believe he doesn't know homosexuals, but it's possible, he not being from a major metropolitan area.
It's a concern that some people have victimized Asian people but it isn't as widespread as the media is portraying the situation. Asian people have been assimilated into our society for decades. I've never seen any bias against them.
The truth is race relations are much better in America than most parts of the world. But, racism is a winner for Dems so they ad their media accomplices do all they can to exacerbate racial division.
Which brings us to Georgia. If you want some real humor, listen to some Dem attempts to defend the notion that Georgia's election laws are racist. The new law stacks up well against laws in New York and Colorado, where baseball has moved the All-Star game. confronted with that, Dems say it's racist because there was no proven voter fraud in 2020. So, in other words, because Dems won in Georgia, no laws can be strengthened lest their chances go down. Even in Maryland, politicians are not allowed to pass out food and water to people in line to vote. But, how does that prevent non-whites from voting? Similarly, why is 17 days not enough time for early voting? How does that suppress non-white votes? Most Americans agree that people should have to show ID to vote, but to Dems, that is a racist position. Anyway, right now, corporate America is voting for Dems. Makes you wonder why Dems despise them so.
btw, 44% of new cases of COVID are currently in five states: Michigan, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Florida. Cases are plummeting in Texas, land of the full baseball stadiums, and California. You may notice there is no evidence for the efficacy of lockdown restrictions. It doesn't seem to matter for health purposes, although it does for the economic prospects of the working class.
Of course deaths are down everywhere. That's because most people over 75 have now been vaccinated. But why is Biden resisting calls to increase the vaccine allotment to the five states that account for most new cases. It would make a huge difference. If it was Trump doing that, you'd hear uproar in the media.
"politicians are not allowed to pass out food and water to people in line to vote"
Politicians?
What's that a bad GOP joke?
Maybe MD law says that (you made the claim, let see the proof), but Georgia law doesn't say anything about "politicians" passing out water to people in line.
Arresting a duly elected legislator who wanted to witness the signing of this racist Georgia voter bill into law was another bad GOP joke.
That matter has been closed.
ATLANTA (AP) — A district attorney in Atlanta said Wednesday that she will not pursue charges against a Georgia state lawmaker who was arrested during a protest of the state’s sweeping new election law.
“After reviewing all of the evidence, I have decided to close this matter,” Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said in an emailed statement. “It will not be presented to a grand jury for consideration of indictment, and it is now closed.”
Rep. Park Cannon, a Democrat from Atlanta, was arrested March 25 after she knocked on the door to Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s office while he was on live television speaking about the voting bill he had just signed into law. Police charged her with obstruction of law enforcement and disruption of the General Assembly. She was released from jail later that evening.
“While some of Representative Cannon’s colleagues and the police officers involved may have found her behavior annoying, such sentiment does not justify a presentment to a grand jury of the allegations in the arrest warrants or any other felony charges,” Willis said.
Informed of the district attorney’s decision by The Associated Press, Cannon’s attorney, Gerald Griggs, said, “We are appreciative of the decision of the district attorney after we provided witnesses to her and we plan to speak publicly very soon about our next steps.”
The Republican-backed rewrite of Georgia’s election rules adds a new photo ID requirement to vote absentee by mail, gives the State Election Board new powers to intervene in county election offices and to remove and replace local election officials, prohibits people from giving water and snacks to people waiting in line , and makes some changes to early voting, among other things...
"Politicians?
What's that a bad GOP joke?
Maybe MD law says that (you made the claim, let see the proof), but Georgia law doesn't say anything about "politicians" passing out water to people in line."
I've been voting in Maryland for years
all partisan activity is disallowed within a certain distance
of course, I have talked to candidates after voting but they are always the prescribed distance from voters in line, just like they will be in Georgia
btw, in Georgia, election officials can provide water
and people can bring it themselves
"Arresting a duly elected legislator who wanted to witness the signing of this racist Georgia voter bill into law was another bad GOP joke."
she wanted to attend an event she wasn't invited to, bang on the door to make sure she could provide a disruption, and refused to follow the direction of police officers
the governor can invite anyone he wants to the signing ceremony
someone spreading lies and conspiracy theories would likely not get an invitation
"That matter has been closed."
of course it is
that's how things like this usually work in America
are you from America?
The National Republican Congressional Committee is using threatening language to push Republicans into making repeat monthly donations.
The NRCC, which raises money for House Republicans, warns donors against unchecking this prechecked box:
"We need to know we haven't lost you to the Radical Left. If you UNCHCK this box, we will have to tell Trump you're a DEFECTOR & sided with the Dems. CHECK this box and we can win back the House and get Trump to run in 2024."
The text appears on the WinRed fundraising platform. The NRCC directly links to the page from its website.
Donors who fail to uncheck the box — including those who haven’t even noticed it — will have money removed from their accounts each month.
The Trump campaign used a similar fundraising tactic for the 2020 election, The New York Times reported over the weekend. The outcry from tricked Trump donors resulted in 530,000 refunds, but the scheme nevertheless allowed the ex-president’s failed campaign the use of what amounted to an interest-free loan, according to the paper.
One year ago today:
TRUMP: "If we can stay substantially under 100,000 [American deaths] -- which was the original projection -- I think we did a very good job."
Video
2:07 PM · Apr 8, 2021 ·Twitter Web App
Aaron Rupar
It's remarkable to revisit these clips and see that as late as last April 8 mask-wearing in public was still the exception to the norm. I see one reporter in the whole press room with a mask.
"It's remarkable to revisit these clips and see that as late as last April 8 mask-wearing in public was still the exception to the norm. I see one reporter in the whole press room with a mask."
everywhere I go, everyone is wearing a mask
but glad you scour the planet and find someone is isn't
btw, in California, you can vote Dem or you can vote trans but you can't vote both:
Transgender rights activist and reality TV star Caitlyn Jenner and her political advisers are gathering at her Malibu home next week to discuss her potential candidacy in the upcoming California gubernatorial recall election.
The meeting comes as Jenner, a 71-year-old Olympic gold-medal decathlete and Republican activist who for years appeared on “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” explores whether to enter the race.
With just 15 words, Joe Manchin ended the possibility that Joe Biden's first term would live up to the hopes that liberals had for it on everything from gun control to voting rights to even, possibly, the size and scope of the President's $2 trillion infrastructure bill.
"There is no circumstance in which I will vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster," wrote the West Virginia Democratic senator in a Washington Post op-ed published Wednesday night.
Which is pretty dang airtight when it comes to pledges. And which means, assuming Manchin sticks to it, that Democrats do not have the 50 votes they would need to change the Senate rules to eliminate the legislative filibuster. Which, in turn, means that the idea of passing meaningful gun control legislation or moving forward on the election reform bill passed by the House are simply not possible.
But, it's more than that too. While the big headline of the Manchin op-ed is his opposition to ending the filibuster, he also makes clear that he disapproves of using "reconciliation" -- a budget tool that allows bills to be passed with a simple majority -- for things not directly tied to the budget, which very much includes Biden's infrastructure bill.
"We should all be alarmed at how the budget reconciliation process is being used by both parties to stifle debate around the major issues facing our country today," wrote Manchin, adding: "I simply do not believe budget reconciliation should replace regular order in the Senate. How is that good for the future of this nation? Senate Democrats must avoid the temptation to abandon our Republican colleagues on important national issues. Republicans, however, have a responsibility to stop saying no, and participate in finding real compromise with Democrats."
Which is a very big deal. Especially when you consider that Senate Republicans -- led by Mitch McConnell -- have offered very little reason to believe they will come to the negotiating table with Biden.
"I'm going to fight them every step of the way, because I think this is the wrong prescription for America," McConnell has said of the $2 trillion package.
If McConnell can keep his side in line, as he has thus far -- and Manchin continues to oppose using reconciliation to pass the infrastructure bill -- then the legislation will stall. And in order to restart it, Biden (and Senate Democrats) will have to make major compromises -- read: cuts -- to the size of the proposal in order to get the 60 votes it would need to end filibuster and bring the measure to a final vote.
U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz is facing a money trail that further ties him to disgraced former Seminole County Tax Collector Joel Greenberg and allegations of sex trafficking.
Gaetz reportedly used the payment app Venmo to send Greenberg $900, split between two transactions late at night in May 2018, according to The Daily Beast. The next morning, the publication reports Greenberg used the same app to send three young women various amounts of money, totaling $900.
In one of the transactions to Greenberg, Gaetz labeled the payment, “Test,” but in the other, he reportedly wrote “hit up” and then the nickname of one of the young women. The Daily Beast did not use the nickname in its reporting because the girl had only just turned 18 less than six months before the Venmo transaction.
When Greenberg sent the same amount he received from Gaetz to the three women, he listed them as being for “school” in two of the transactions and for “tuition” in the other, The Daily Beast reported.
The latest comes as Gaetz is reportedly, according to The New York Times, under federal investigation into his involvement with Greenberg and sex trafficking. Greenberg has already been federally indicted on 33 counts, including sex trafficking a 17-year old. Court documents also reportedly say he was “engaged in ‘sugar daddy’ relationships,” which occur when one party pays sums of money in return for a relationship, usually between an older man and a younger women.
Greenberg is now seeking a plea deal with federal prosecutors.
The Daily Beast wrote that Gaetz and Greenberg were connected through Venmo to one of the girls, the newly turned 18-year old.
Neither Gaetz nor Greenberg’s Venmo transactions are public, but The Daily Beast wrote that they obtained records through a source. Those records also showed both embattled men were connected on Venmo to at least one other woman, which also showed Greenberg paid her “several thousand dollars” using a government-issued credit card.
While Greenberg has been charged with crimes, Gaetz has not. Both men deny any wrongdoing. Gaetz has confirmed there is an investigation, but claims the accusations are false, and motivated by what he called an extortion attempt. In an op-ed to the conservative Washington Examiner last week, following initial reporting on the investigation, Gaetz wrote that he had “never, ever paid women for sex.”
What happened to baseball (or any sport for that matter) being a fun escape, a light distraction from our everyday lives?
America’s national pastime is now embroiled in partisan nastiness, thanks to a woke company and a chorus of media propagandists…
Major League Baseball (MLB) announced last Friday that it would move the All-Star Game from its planned location in Atlanta this summer. The league is doing this to punish the state of Georgia for the passage of “The Election Integrity Act of 2021.”
That’s right, one of the biggest professional sports leagues in America is punishing an entire state for passing a constitutional, utterly reasonable bill that clarifies some voting procedures. Many of the SB 202 adjustments have been welcomed by local election officials who were overwhelmed by the last election’s record turnout and an unprecedented shift toward mail-in voting.
A state law that codifies many additional access provisions and is almost certain to increase voting across the board – while also making fraud more difficult – is being described as “restrictive” and “racist.”
The usual activists and chattering classes are hailing MLB’s actions as a victory for voting rights and social justice. They’re treating the mobilization of MLB and other mega-corporations like Delta and Coca-Cola against the Georgia GOP as though it’s all part of a great moral crusade to “protect our democracy” and “stop voter suppression.”
Unfortunately, that’s a fanciful narrative that relies on the misrepresentation of what the Georgia law actually does. But the lies come from the very top on this one…
While the media pretends Joe Biden is a straight shooter, the Georgia voting bill is an excellent case study in what a lying fraud the 46th president really is.
Biden’s comments on the Georgia law aren’t just unfair… they’re reckless. He has accused Republicans in the state of enacting “Jim Crow in the 21st century.” Come on, not even Biden can be this dumb… He’s misrepresenting the facts of the law, and purposefully so. Here’s an example of the president’s malarkey on Georgia’s “voter integrity act” from last week:
"It’s an atrocity, the idea, you want any indication that… it has nothing to do with fairness, nothing to do with decency, they pass a law saying you can’t provide water for people standing in line while they’re waiting to vote… you don’t need anything else to know that… this is nothing but punitive, designed to keep people from voting… you can’t provide water for people about to vote, give me a break. "
An “atrocity?” First of all, the notion that providing food and drink to people waiting in line to vote is some sacred Democratic norm is absurd. Nobody is dying of thirst or hunger at the polling booth because they had to wait a bit to vote. It’s Georgia, not the Sahara desert.
But more to the point, what Biden is claiming isn’t even accurate. SB 202 specifically allows for polling places to provide self-service water to people waiting to vote. It also states that any organization or individual may provide food and drink to voters as long as they are 150 feet from the polling place.
The law isn’t trying to stop Americans from having a snack… It’s just meant to prevent active electioneering in voting lines by people who are offering a cheeseburger while giving a nod and a wink to “vote for the right candidate.”
This point, a minor and wholly appropriate limitation on the provision of snacks in voting lines, is supposedly among the most egregious offenses in SB 202. What a joke. Senator Chuck Schumer, among other dishonest Democrats, has been hammering the talking points on this for weeks anyway.
And national media outlets have been covering the Georgia law with breathless moral indignation without ever telling their audience the truth… The law is actually fine, fair, and will make elections in Georgia function better.
So in response to the drumbeat of all this propaganda, MLB decided to pull an All-Star Game from a Democrat-controlled city in a state where Democrats just won two Senate seats and voted for Biden. It’s estimated this could cost the Atlanta area $100 million in lost revenues.
Adding to the ridiculousness of this whole situation is the fact that the All-Star Game has been moved from Atlanta to Denver in protest of Georgia’s new voting laws, yet Colorado has similar stringent voting rules.
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp was also scratching his head on this…
Georgia has 17 days of in-person early voting including two optional Sundays, Colorado has 15… So what I’m being told, they also have a photo ID requirement. So it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.
In order to get some favorable press from the New York Times and CNN, MLB has punished thousands of people struggling through the pandemic to make a living who had nothing to with this law but were looking forward to making some money for their labor.
But wokeness means never having to apologize for hurting restaurant owners and workers, hoteliers, stadium employees, and the vendors selling t-shirts with players’ names on them. The guy walking around selling popcorn for just above minimum wage will lose out, but MLB grandees like Commissioner Robert Manfred get to virtue signal… and that’s what matters most to the woke mafia.
The hypocrisy is pretty thick on this one… If Manfred believes relocating the All-Star Game demonstrates MLB’s “opposition to U.S. voter restrictions,” why just pull one baseball game from Georgia? What about the Atlanta Falcons seasons or all the Braves games?
Senator Marco Rubio is also calling bullsh**… Rubio sent a letter to Manfred asking if he would be relinquishing his personal membership to the Augusta National Golf Club since the club was also located in Georgia. (I think we all know the answer to that one.)
The bigger question now is what will be done in response to this absurd MLB overreach. In the era of cancel culture, corporate political pressure only seems to go one way: against Republicans. It’s long past time for half the country to recognize that boycotts can’t be a weapon that only one side uses.
That means people who believe in the right for states to set their own election laws and combat fraud should think twice before buying Yankees tickets or switching on the Marlins game. Otherwise, this odious trend of woke, inc. will only get worse.
Outbreaks are ripping through workplaces, restaurants, churches and family weddings. Hospitals are overwhelmed with patients. Officials are reporting more than 7,000 new infections each day, a sevenfold increase from late February. And Michigan is home to nine of the 10 metro areas with the country’s highest recent case rates.
Joe Biden has put a presidential imprimatur on climate change being an existential threat, and he doesn’t mean in the Jean-Paul Sartre sense of man’s search for meaning in an uncomforting universe.
He means the end of humanity, a claim nowhere found in climate science.
This is odd because the real news today is elsewhere. Its movement may be ocean-liner-like, the news may be five years old before the New York Times notices it, but the climate community has been backing away from a worst-case scenario peddled to the public for years as “business as usual.”
A drumroll moment was Zeke Hausfather and Glen Peter’s 2020 article in the journal Nature partly headlined: “Stop using the worst-case scenario for climate warming as the most likely outcome.”
This followed the 2017 paper by Justin Ritchie and Hadi Dowlatabadi asking why climate scenarios posit implausible increases in coal burning a century from now. And I could go on. Roger Pielke Jr. and colleagues show how the RCP 8.5 scenario was born to give modelers a high-emissions scenario to play with, and how it came to be embraced despite being at odds with every real-world indicator concerning the expected course of future emissions.
In a simple model of the world, authority figures say absurd and false things, and the media calls them out. The reverse happened this time, with the climate crowd reacting to the media’s botched coverage of the Fourth National Climate Assessment in 2018, itself a strained compilation of extreme worst-case scenarios that still couldn’t deliver the desired global meltdown.
Even David Wallace-Wells, the author of 2019’s climate-crisis book “The Uninhabitable Earth,” was moved to call on fellow activists to revise their advocacy “in a less alarmist direction.”
To this day, the print edition of the New York Times has never mentioned RCP 8.5, the unsupported emissions scenario on which so many of its climate jeremiads rest.
The Washington Post has used it twice, once to say it portended a climate disaster and more recently to suggest its falling out of favor didn’t mean the climate wasn’t headed for disaster.
How did we get from reality to Greta Thunberg, Joe Biden and a Bloomberg columnist who says Exxon “threatens the continuation of human life on earth”? Decades ago, casual theorizing suggested global warming might cause the oceans to stop circulating and North America to freeze over, giving rise to the 2004 cinematic and scientific disaster of a movie known as “The Day After Tomorrow.”
Al Gore touted the same scenario but later dropped it, and climate catastrophism has had to survive ever since without scientific underpinning.
The strain of holding realism at bay is starting to tell. John Kerry, the new climate czar, recently blurted out that the Biden green agenda will have no effect on climate unless countries like China and India join, which they already declared they won’t.
A bigger moment of truth will come with a book by Steven Koonin, a theoretical physicist and chief scientist of the Obama Energy Department, demonstrating what the science—the plain, recognized, consensus science—says about climate change: It won’t be catastrophic. It’s unlikely to be influenced in a major way by policy actions. The costs will be large in relation to everything except the future, richer economy that will easily pay for them.
Let’s turn to a nearby letter from Tom Gjelten that breezes past the substance of his own NPR report as well as my criticism of it: his failure to tell listeners that 40% of U.S. refugee slots in 2020 went unclaimed because of the pandemic. Mr. Gjelten’s real focus is to defend a bureaucratic trope. His “refugees” are people under the care of friendly governments and aid groups whom the U.S. agrees to resettle, when the vast majority who seek succor in the U.S. nowadays are those he calls “asylees,” tens of thousands fleeing violence in our own hemisphere who show up directly at our border with only the U.S. accepting any responsibility for them.
His pet refugee program, known as USRAP, admitted just 801 people in 2019 from all of South and Central America, when more than 250,000 were known to have fled Honduras alone. It boggles Mr. Gjelten’s bureaucratic sense of propriety that I use the term refugees for people who are, you know, refugees. And the parody continues: Catherine Rampell, in the Washington Post, now accuses Mr. Biden of being the “most anti-refugee president in history” even as he adds to a 600,000-plus backlog of people admitted while their claims of persecution are being vetted.
There are terms that apply—reification fallacy, equivocation fallacy—for a journalism that loses sight of the world and plain meanings in its quest to situate itself among prefab talking points. Let this process run away with itself, and that’s how you get a climate journalism more founded in fantasy than in science, with Joe Biden feeling the need to blather about the end of the world
SAVANNAH, Georgia (AP) — With coronavirus shots now in the arms of nearly half of American adults, the parts of the U.S. that are excelling and those that are struggling with vaccinations are starting to look like the nation’s political map: deeply divided between red and blue states.
Out in front is New Hampshire, where 65% of the population age 18 and older has received at least one dose of the vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Following close behind are New Mexico, Connecticut, Maine and Massachusetts at 55% or greater. All have a history of voting Democratic and supported President Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
Meanwhile, at the bottom are five states where fewer than 40% have rolled up their sleeves for a shot. Four of them — Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee — lean Republican and voted for Donald Trump last fall. The fifth is Georgia, which has a Republican governor and supported GOP presidential candidates for nearly three decades before narrowly backing Biden.
The emerging pattern: Americans in blue states that lean Democratic appear to be getting vaccinated at more robust rates, while those in red Republican states seem to be more hesitant.
“We can draw a conclusion that red states and voters that voted for Trump are going to be more difficult to vaccinate because we have real good survey data to support that,” said Dr. Howard Forman, a professor of public health and management at the Yale School of Medicine.
A poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research in late March found that 36% of Republicans said they will probably or definitely not get vaccinated, compared with 12% of Democrats. Similarly, a third of rural Americans said they were leaning against getting shots, while fewer than a fourth of people living in cities and suburbs shared that hesitancy...
that's fascinating, AP News
according to the Washington Post this morning, 33 states are hot spots including the entire Rust Belt, from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin, Minnesota, Maine, New Hampshire, Delaware, Maryland, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, et al
meanwhile, cases and hospitalizations are plummeting in the Deep South, Texas and the Plain States
so, the vaccinations are great but the blue states seem to be missing something
maybe it's personal responsibility as they lean too much on the government and the incompetent Fauci
btw, The Washington Post is owned by the guy who has more money off the pandemic than anyone else
he's a big-time Dem
forget about taxing him, let's talk anti-trust action
When testing for COVID 19 drops, so do cases.
COVID-19 testing has dropped to its lowest point in Texas since last fall.
During the winter storm that left millions of Texans without access to electricity or water, testing rates dipped below 50,000 tests per day on average for the first time since September.
Testing levels rebounded after the winter storm, but the number of tests reported in March is still significantly lower than during December, January and February, at the peak of the pandemic in Texas.
"during December, January and February, at the peak of the pandemic in Texas"
the pandemic peaked everywhere in January and February
let me get this straight, you think the Washington Post, owned by the guy who has more money off the pandemic than anyone, is wrong and that the Rust Belt is just testing more than the South and the pandemic is no worse in Michigan than Texas?
just want to gauge your level of reality denial
"ignorance is bliss"....LOL!
My info came from the non-profit Texas Tribune after you cited the WaPo like it was gospel.
Guess about my thoughts all you want if you think it'll help.
oh, I needn't make guesses
you've given your position clearly
my question was simply an expression of amazement that anyone could be so ignorant
but I guess your chosen handle so it all
"ignorance is bliss"
at least you take your commitment to the idea seriously
The ignorance of states like Texas reopening for business while decreasing testing for COVID is astounding.
Texas is currently testing at its lowest rate since last fall, whereas Michigan's COVID testing has been steady.
Of course a state's COVID rate will appear to have gone down when that state reduces testing for it.
A person with COVID symptoms might be more likely to get tested than an asymptomatic carrier.
Studies show that at least 40-to-50% of people who test positive for COVID-19 have no symptoms.
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-3012
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-1595_article
thanks for sharing, Ignorance
the experts say that testing doesn't account for the difference betwixt Texas and Michigan
do you disagree?
"btw, that's a yes-or-no question"
https://www.theepochtimes.com/desantis-lockdowns-were-a-huge-mistake_3777926.html?utm_source=partner
hypocrisy alert:
she voted to impeach Donald Trump
California Representative Maxine Waters joined protesters in Minnesota as demonstrations entered a seventh night on Saturday after the death of Daunte Wright.
Waters told the protesters at Brooklyn Center that she will fight for justice on their behalf and urged them to 'to get more confrontational' - just one day after protests descended into violence
The Oklahoma City bombing was a domestic terrorist truck bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States, on Wednesday, April 19, 1995, perpetrated by anti-government extremists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols.
Anti-government extremists perpetrated an attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence reports Domestic Violent Extremism Poses Heightened Threat in 2021
01March2021
A Florida House bill was passed last week that bans transgender girls from playing girls sports and provides for inspections of "disputed" athletes before they can play.
The proposed HB 1475 was passed by the Republican-controlled Florida House, with the bill now going to the state Senate.
The bill, called the "Fairness in Women's Sports Act" passed the House on a near party line of 77-40 vote. One Democrat, Representative James Bush of Miami, voted with the Republicans to pass the measure.
Critics of the bill say it is bigoted and unnecessary. The Florida High School Athletic Association, the NCAA and the IOC already have policies for trans students to play on high school, college teams and Olympic teams. No documented problems have ever arisen and trans girls and women are not dominating their sports despite it being a primary argument against trans equality.
House bill sponsor, Republican Kaylee Tuck of Lake Placid, Florida, doesn't think these longstanding rules put in place by athletic experts go far enough. She argued her bill doesn't ban trans girls from participating in sports but instead forces them to play on teams based on their "biological gender."
The idea of a set-in-stone biological sex that someone is born with, and determined by unsound science is one that oversimplifies what gender is in humans. Experts have repeatedly called for bad science to not be used to justify bigotry.
To try and account for this, Rep. Tuck's bill requires an examination of disputed athletes to verify their sex based on one or more of the following:
-The student's reproductive anatomy/visible genitals
-The student's genetic makeup
-The student's normal endogenously produced testosterone levels
It's important to note all three of these tests could produce different conclusions in the same individual. Many cisgender girls with conditions like polycystic ovarian syndrome could also be banned based on these metrics.
Back in 2017, a cisgender girl was barred from playing in a soccer tournament because officials thought she looked "like a boy" despite documentation proving she was a cisgender girl.
With the new Florida GOP anti-trans bill, those same officials could now demand to see the girl's genitals as proof. The cisgender girl was only 8 years old.
It's an incredibly invasive testing standard that's not clearly defined, and far above and beyond what a standard physical would call for.
Many other states have anti-trans bills, with the topic of trans athletes becoming a wedge issue the Republicans are using to try and scare parents. Republican Senator Rand Paul scare mongered people by speaking of "hulking six-foot-four guys" playing on girls teams.
The NCAA doesn't seem worried, however, and in a statement said they planned to not hold championships in any state that does not provide an environment free of discrimination. This will come to a head, as there are several championship events planned in Florida later this year.
But the most affected of all in this are trans girls being discriminated against. Almost all the GOP sponsored bills don't provide restrictions for trans boys playing on boys' or girls' teams.
The bill has been heavily criticized for targeting trans girls and forcing anyone suspected of being a trans girl or woman to get an invasive, traumatizing examination.
Democratic Representative Anna Eskamani said:
"Sports have become another avenue to attack the rights of trans people."
"And those efforts have caused incredible harm to trans youth, who, like all kids, especially in the middle of a pandemic, deserve compassion and support."
Many called on people to listen to trans women about the discrimination they face.
The Florida House bill will be debated with the Senate's SB 2012, a similar proposal, but one that gives circumstances in which a trans woman could play for the women's team, technically making it less stringent.
The problem with science denial is that the truth is the truth, no matter what your opinion on the subject is. Not to worry, the chances are it won’t make a difference in your daily life — but beware, it can kill you. The moral is, pick your stupidity wisely. Denying evolution makes you look like an idiot, but physically leaves you unharmed. Denying climate change might kill your descendants, but you’ll probably make it. But thinking COVID is a hoax can be fatal. And so it was for Hans Kristian Gaarder. On April 6th he died — aged 60 — of COVID.
Gaarder — although not an Amerian — certainly believed like a certain kind of one. He was an aficionado of 2020 US electoral conspiracy theories. He had a beef with the Illuminati. But his real passion was COVID denial. As late as March 18, he was on social media criticizing the “massive measures” aimed at preventing infection of “something that will be like a cold or light flu.” He wondered whether the measures really were a means of “camouflaging that the Coronavirus does NOT spread from person to person.”
Identifying himself as an independent researcher of suppressed information, he reminded his followers to remember that the “lying and weak media’s job is to trick its readers into blindly and obediently being led into the mud by lying and weak politicians.”
On March 26th and 27th, undeterred by local ordinances enacted in the face of new virulent viral strains, he had two house parties. In at least one, the guests discussed the topic of “Trump, Biden and the way forward for the United States and the world”. A dozen attendees have now come down with the disease. Gaarder ignored his symptoms, refused a COVID test, and denied having coronavirus until he expired.
Gaarder is not new to the denial game. In 2009, he took the same dismissive approach to swine flu. Over the years he explored his passion for conspiracy in an online magazine and TV interviews. Gaarder also wrote for a Norwegian website known for reporting on alternative health care and spreading conspiracy theories. Many of its writers and readers are also highly skeptical of vaccines. As late as Monday, April 5th, the day before he died, the site reported that news of Gaarder’s infection was fake and he was completely healthy.
Ironically, a cynic might say that the best evidence to discredit the theory of evolution is the continued existence of morons like Gaarder. It is hard to see how the perpetuation of this kind of insanity points to ‘survival of the fittest’. But better minds than mine will easily explain the seeming inconsistency.
"The problem with science denial is that the truth is the truth, no matter what your opinion on the subject is."
The problem with liberals accusing others of denying science is that they regularly deny science whenever it conflicts with their agenda.
Hence, science has clearly said there is little risk to kids from COVID and little risk of the kids spreading it to others. And yet, many kids lost more than a year of school.
Hence, science has clearly said that the risk of dying for people under 50 is less than the flu. And yet, progressives have pushed restrictions that have economically devastated the working class.
Hence, science has clearly said that the risk of catching COVID from contact with surfaces is close to zero. And yet, Americans have been way overexposed to household cleaners that at high levels have been linked to all kinds of health consequences.
The TRUTH is, all other risks in our society have been sublimated to COVID risk without considering the science.
Read Joseph Ladapo's article on COVID Mania in today's Wall Street Journal:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-american-epidemic-of-covid-mania-11618871457
"But better minds than mine"
won't be hard to find
GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY!!!!
ALL THREE COUNTS!!!!
Gee thank for yet another right-wing opinion piece from a rump-licker.
Joseph Ladapo was an ardent proponent for the “open the economy back up” school of thought. At the start of the pandemic, he penned an op-ed for USA Today downplaying the lethality of the virus and advocating for the economy to stay open in lieu of lengthy shutdowns.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/03/24/coronavirus-shutdowns-worth-public-health-system-unprepared-column/2898324001/
He wanted us to reopen way back in 2020.
We can all see how wrong he was here:
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailytrendsdeaths
"GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY!!!!
ALL THREE COUNTS!!!!"
of course, he's guilty
we can all rest assured this monster is now off the streets
but true justice won't be here until all cops are gone who have the attitude that challenging their authority is a capital offense for black people
although Chauvin faces a maximum of forty years, the sentencing guidelines call for about a ten and a half year sentence
hopefully, the judge will take into account aggravating enormity of this crime
"Gee thank for yet another right-wing opinion piece from a rump-licker."
gee, public health is not a partisan issue
Trump is gone, so the need to turn it into one is over for lunatic fringe liberals
even the WHO has noted that ubiquitous lockdowns are not necessary to mitigate the virus in most circumstances
"Joseph Ladapo was an ardent proponent for the “open the economy back up” school of thought. At the start of the pandemic, he penned an op-ed for USA Today downplaying the lethality of the virus and advocating for the economy to stay open in lieu of lengthy shutdowns."
Joseph Ladapo is a physician and health policy researcher with the UCLA School of Medicine
what credentials do you have that justifies your attack on the validity of his opinion?
"https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/03/24/coronavirus-shutdowns-worth-public-health-system-unprepared-column/2898324001/
He wanted us to reopen way back in 2020."
well, he was right then, as now
since we have fifty states, all with different policies, we can easily see that extreme lockdowns and restrictions worked no better than letting citizens be responsible for their own health
our economy, especially the working class, would be much better off now had we focused on protecting the most vulnerable and keeping the rest of economy going
"We can all see how wrong he was here:
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailytrendsdeaths"
actually, for those under 50, this virus is less lethal than the common flu
as Ladapo noted, we have elevated the risk of COVID above every other risk in our society
there have been consequences we could have avoided without any risk to the population any higher than that which we tolerate for anything else
Bill Maher, not exactly a right-wing extremist, recently pointed this out on his program
he noted that the left has rejected reason and scientific advice in an anti-Trump delirium
Trump's in Florida
snap out of it!
Florida's COVID rates and deaths are ticking upward again.
https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spread-map/state/florida
PHOENIX (AP) — Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey on Tuesday vetoed legislation that would have made the state's sex education laws some of the strictest in the nation when it comes to teaching about LGBTQ issues.
The governor called the legislation overly broad and vague and said it would lead to unintended consequences. He also said he was concerned a ban on sex education before 5th grade could put vulnerable children at risk by limiting sexual abuse prevention education.
At the same time, the Republican issued an executive order adopting some of the transparency portions of the measure.
The proposed law, Senate Bill 1456, would have barred all discussions about gender identity, sexual orientation or HIV/AIDS in sex education classes unless parents are notified in advance and specifically opt in for the instruction.
The proposal applied outside of sex ed classes as well, requiring parents to agree to have their children learn about historical events such as a discussion of the modern gay rights movement that sprang from the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York.
It also banned any sex ed classes before 5th grade, which opponents have said will put young students who now learn about “good touch-bad touch” to avoid molestation at greater risk.
Social conservative groups that backed the measure call it a needed parental rights issue, arguing that parents deserve to know and approve of what their children are taught in school. Arizona currently allows parents to review all learning material and already requires an opt-in for sex ed classes.
The state's top elected schools official, Superintendent of Public Instruction Kathy Hoffman, praised the governor for the veto.
Ducey “made the right decision by vetoing SB1456 and I want to thank him for standing up to bigotry and intolerance,” Hoffman said in a tweet. “All students are welcome in Arizona’s public schools and today’s veto reaffirms that.”
The bill passed the Republican-controlled Legislation over unified opposition from Democrats, who called it dangerous for LGBTQ students who are already marginalized. They also said it put young children who would no longer be taught how to avoid molesters at risk.
Ducey's executive order requires schools to post sex ed curricula online and to provide extensive notice of school board meetings where sex ed is to be discussed. Those were parts of the proposed law.
“Arizona is and will remain a national leader in parental rights,” Ducey said in a statement. ”Too often, parents are left out of this process, and the importance is even greater when it comes to educating students about deeply personal matters like sex education."
He said the executive order will ensure parents are fully informed.
The meaning of religious freedom remains one of the more contested areas of our constitutional politics. The progressive left tends to emphasize freedom from religion, especially freedom from the influence of traditional religious sexual morality. Social conservatives, by contrast, emphasize the right to be religious, especially the freedom to live and act in the public square according to one’s religious convictions. With President Joe Biden’s recent tweet that transgender equality is the “civil rights issue of our time,” the conflict between these competing views of religious liberty will only be amplified.
Both sides in our current church-state debates claim the Founding Fathers as supporters. Progressives say the Founders gave us a secular constitution that does not acknowledge God or the Bible. The First Amendment, moreover, prohibits the establishment of religion, which Thomas Jefferson said erects a “wall of separation” between church and state.
Conservatives counter that the Founders embraced religion in their deeds. Consider George Washington’s first inaugural, most of which was a prayer. “It would be peculiarly improper to omit in this first official Act,” President Washington declared,
"my fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the Universe, who presides in the Councils of Nations, and whose providential aids can supply every human defect, that his benediction may consecrate to the liberties and happiness of the People of the United States . . . ."
Conservatives also note that the First Amendment declares that Congress “shall make no law . . . prohibiting the free exercise” of religion. Whatever the Establishment Clause means, conservatives claim that the Founders’ speeches, deeds, and other constitutional provisions reveal that they did not intend to purge religion from the public square.
Freedom from religion and the freedom to practice one’s religion are, in fact, both aspects of the Founders’ understanding of our inalienable natural right of religious liberty.
Given these seemingly contradictory commitments – freedom from religion, on the one hand, and freedom for religion, on the other – what are we to make of our “first freedom”? Does the Founders’ Constitution offer a coherent understanding of religious liberty, one that we might recur to today in our religiously and morally pluralistic nation?
The Founders have much to teach us, but the lessons they offer do not neatly fit into our current political categories. Freedom from religion and the freedom to practice one’s religion are, in fact, both aspects of the Founders’ understanding of our inalienable natural right of religious liberty.
We don’t quite understand the Founders because we have forgotten their basic principles of government. As we do today, the Founders used the language of rights; but their understanding of rights was far deeper, philosophically richer, and more integrated with a robust notion of duties than ours. We tend to think of rights as interests that are especially important or necessary. We say health care and freedom of speech are rights, for example, because we believe bodily health and the expression of one’s opinions are necessary to live a decent life. At the same time, our legal practice recognizes that even “fundamental rights,” such as free speech, can be curtailed if “compelling state interests” are at stake and the government uses “the least restrictive means” to do so. The underlying presumption in how we recognize rights and in how we limit them is that rights come from the state. We think good government grants extensive rights to citizens, because we believe the role of government is to satisfy our collective will and help us gratify our individual desires. But the extent to which any particular right is available depends on it being “balanced” against other rights and state interests, a process administered in the final analysis by the administrative state and the federal judiciary.
The Founders had a different understanding, at least when it came to “natural rights” such as religious liberty. “Natural” is this context means that the foundation of the right lies in our human nature as created by God. The natural right to religious liberty, in other words, is not granted by government; it is a part of the natural fabric of the created moral order, an order in which rights and duties are reciprocal. A just government recognizes this preexisting order; it does not create it.
James Madison, the most philosophically articulate Founder on religious freedom, stated the matter most clearly. “What is here a right towards men,” Madison explained, “is a duty towards the Creator. It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and such only as he believes to be acceptable to him.” Because we are first and foremost children of the Creator, our first allegiance is always to God. The political institutions we create and the civic obligations we impose, accordingly, must recognize our preexisting sacred duties. Our politics must remain limited in its aims out of respect and deference to higher claims of religious authority. We have a political right to religious liberty because we have more sacred and sovereign duties to God.
When government acts within its proper domain, religious citizens can be accommodated from burdensome laws, but they have no right to be exempted from otherwise constitutional laws.
For the Founders, then, the right of religious liberty imposes limits on the state’s authority. “Congress shall make no law . . . prohibiting the free exercise” of religion because political authorities cannot legitimately exercise direct authority over religious exercises as such.
Congress – and the states, via the Fourteenth Amendment’s application of the First Amendment against them – lacks legitimate authority to regulate any aspect of religious worship, including by whom, how, where, and when it is performed. Government officials, accordingly, have no authority to punish an individual for improper worship or to command an individual to worship. How, or whether, individuals worship is not, properly speaking, a direct concern of government. It cannot be, since we the people do not – indeed, could not – give government that authority. That is what it means for the people to retain their “inalienable” rights.
This absence of jurisdiction that prohibits regulation of worship as such is also why the Founders said government cannot establish a religion. The Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause together articulate the limits on government authority needed to safeguard individuals’ natural right to religious liberty. Just as government cannot regulate religious practices, it cannot legitimately license preachers or employ official religious ministers as agents of the state, to take two classic examples of what constitutes an establishment of religion.
The Founders understood these limitations on governmental authority to be categorical, which is why they declared that “Congress shall make no law . . . .” For the Founders, “no law” really means no law; since government lacks authority to regulate religious exercises or license ministers, it can never legitimately do so. But the categorical character of religious liberty also means that its scope is relatively narrow. When government acts within its proper domain, religious citizens can be accommodated from burdensome laws, but they have no right to be exempted from otherwise constitutional laws. Likewise, if government cooperates with religious institutions to accomplish an otherwise legitimate civic end, no constitutional barrier is trespassed. The Founders understood the inalienable natural rights of religious liberty only to require the state to remain within its proper sphere. When it does so, legislation can affect religion in ways that religious citizens (just like other citizens) might find either advantageous or unwelcome.
The Supreme Court, however, has long departed from the Founders’ understanding. Starting in the 1940s, the Court expanded the Establishment Clause by reading it to prohibit government policies from advancing religion, even if those policies pursue an otherwise legitimate civic purpose. It increasingly assumed that the federal government must be neutral between religion and irreligion. The Court also expanded the Free Exercise Clause in the 1960s, ruling that it means religious individuals must not always obey legitimate laws that they find burdensome. Today, this interpretation is often criticized by liberals and embraced by conservatives.
The Establishment Clause should not be read as a mandate to discriminate against religion.
In perhaps its most famous “wall of separation” decision, Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971), the Court held that a Catholic school could not receive state funds even to support the teaching of mathematics and other nonreligious subjects. Because money is fungible, the majority opinion held, public funds at religious schools might end up supporting religious education indirectly, thus violating taxpayers’ rights to freedom from religion. For the same reasons, in more recent years the Court’s liberal justices voted to prohibit religious schools from participating in state-funded school-voucher programs in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002), and, in Trinity Lutheran v. Comer (2017), voted to uphold state constitutional provisions that mandate the exclusion of religious institutions and schools from participating in government-funded programs – even innocuous ones, such as programs to improve the safety of school playgrounds.
Following the Founders would lead to a much more common-sense result: if a government policy pursues a valid civic purpose and if religious individuals or institutions qualify to participate in the policy under nonreligious criteria, they shouldn’t be disqualified on account of their religious character. The Establishment Clause should not be read as a mandate to discriminate against religion.
The same kind of rule, in reverse, should apply to the Free Exercise Clause. Many social conservatives understand the right of religious liberty to mean a right of religious individuals and institutions to be exempt from laws that burden their religious beliefs or commitments. The locus of such arguments today is LGBT+ non-discrimination laws, which many traditional and orthodox Jews, Christians, and Muslims find impossible to comply with fully. Most exemption litigation today falls under the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, not the First Amendment. Nonetheless, social conservatives’ basic argument remains the same: religious liberty means that individuals ought to be exempt from otherwise valid but religiously burdensome laws.
The Founders, again, would have held a narrower view of the rights of religious liberty, at least at the level of natural rights. If and when the government passes valid laws that pursue a legitimate civic purpose, the Founders held that religious individuals and institutions have no natural or constitutional right to be exempt from them. The Founders recognized that the rule of law is not perfectly just and that, in some circumstances, exemptions from generally applicable laws might be prudent – for example, Quakers were commonly exempted from militia service during the Founding era. Such exemptions, however, were not understood to be a matter of constitutional right. The Free Exercise Clause was not meant to be a religious-privilege provision.
Church-state issues remain a front in our culture wars, in part, because it is easy to see the unfairness of each side’s position. Court liberals seek to prevent religious individuals from participating in our civic life on equal terms. They unjustly penalize religious citizens to advance an exaggerated notion of freedom from religion. Court conservatives seek to exempt religious individuals from the civic obligation of following duly enacted law. Doing so extends special privileges to religious individuals alone, violating basic notions of equality and fairness.
" . . . The Founders’ more modest approach to religious liberty . . . would emphasize legislative compromise and downplay the role of the judiciary and special-interest law firms. Religious and nonreligious citizens would have to learn to get along better and attempt to work together and adopt laws that can apply to everyone equally."
Adopting the Founders’ approach certainly would not satisfy everyone. Liberals would have to accept that freedom from religion means that one cannot be coerced to go to church – not that one can eliminate the presence of religion from the public square. Conservatives would have to accept that religious freedom means only that government cannot impose targeted disabilities on religion – not that one is entitled to exemptions from otherwise valid laws.
Perhaps the Founders’ more modest approach to religious liberty would satisfy no one. It would emphasize legislative compromise and downplay the role of the judiciary and special-interest law firms. Religious and nonreligious citizens would have to learn to get along better and attempt to work together and adopt laws that can apply to everyone equally. Social conservatives would have to focus on preventing the passage of laws that they find oppressive, not on getting exemptions from them once they’re on the books.
It’s possible that such an approach would only inflame more political disagreement, that religious and nonreligious citizens are so far apart that the best we can hope for is to vigorously assert one’s own conception of rights and defeat the other side in court. But that approach hasn’t worked well for anyone. For more than three generations, we’ve attempted to ignore the Founders’ wisdom on these questions. Given the current state of our partisan divisions, isn’t their approach worth another try?
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;"
if you read the comments by Dr Munoz above, you will see that the meaning of those words had been warped by the courts, beginning about 80 years ago
with our current originalist court, we will be returning to the vision of the founding fathers
no longer will the free exercise of religion be prohibited
and the establishment of secular humanism as our national religion will no longer be allowed
"with our current originalist court, we will be returning to the vision of the founding fathers"
"Three/fifth compromise suited the founding father fine -- they were wrong"
actually, if you understand history, you'll know that the founding fathers did not invent slavery
they did achieve the 3/5 compromise as a way to weaken states where slavery was prevalent
slave-owners wanted their slaves to count as one whole person in deciding congressional
representation and, thus, increase the power of slave-owners
if it weren't for the compromise a slave-owner with 9 slaves would have ten times the congressional representation as a free black in the North
when slavery was defeated, and former slaves gained the right to vote, they had full voting rights, because the 3/5 compromise never applied to free blacks
and, after the Civil War, the 3/5 compromise was eliminated by the process of constitutional amendment, PROVIDED BY THE CONSTITUTION, WHICH WAS WRITTEN BY THE FOUNDING FATHERS, WHO ORIGINALLY, AND WISELY, REDUCED THE POWER OF SLAVE OWNERS
do you often get embarrassed by your ignorance, or do you just repress the memory of it?
just curious...
btw, the head of the transgenders in America is running for governor of California, and Hollywood is howling!
Bruce Jenner confirmed rumors he intends to run for governor of California to replace Gavin Newsom in the recall election.
"I'm in!" the former Olympian and reality star, 71, wrote on Friday. "Sacramento needs an honest leader with a clear vision."
Well, many in Hollywood let it be known on social media they want Jenner out of the race.
Problem is, since Donald Trump was, like, the gay-friendliest President evvvvverrrr, many homosexuals, such as Bruce, are big Trump supporters.
Hours after Bruce's announcement, "HELL NO" began trending on Twitter with various celebrities weighing in.
"You are trying to erase trans youth," Alyssa Milano tweeted.
Author Jennifer Finney Boylan who appeared on Jenner's hit show, Keeping Up With the Kardashians:
"I said everything I have to say when I co-starred on her series. She is my friend, but yes, I did once hit her with a rolled up newspaper,"
Kathy Griffin, who is a family friend of the Kardashians, retweeted singer-songwriter Ricky Davila's message.
"I'll never vote for Caitlyn Jenner Kardashian. She's unqualified, loathsome, selfish and her views are abhorrent," he wrote, noting how Bruce is surrounding himself with some who are loyal to Donald Trump. Bruce was spotted dining with the former president's campaign manager, Brad Parscale.
Griffin also called out one of Bruce's campaign images, which features him driving a vintage car with his dog in the passenger seat. (In 2015, Jenner was involved in a multi-vehicle collision on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu)
"not the best choice for her official campaign photo," Griffin tweeted.
MSNBC's Joy Reid called Jenner "basically a different Trump — rich celebrity running to try and make Republican fascism flirtation seem cool..."
"I have been a compassionate disrupter throughout my life. ... As Californians, we face a now-or-never opportunity to fundamentally fix our state before it's too late," Bruce said in his announcement. "Taking on entrenched Sacramento politicians and the special interests that fund them requires a fighter who isn’t afraid to do what is right. I am a proven winner and the only outsider who can put an end to Gavin Newsom’s disastrous time as governor."
A formal announcement is expected soon. Jenner's bid comes nearly 20 years after Arnold Schwarzenegger successfully became governor of California during a 2003 recall election.
"Three/fifth compromise suited the founding father fine -- they were wrong"
interesting that you think it is wrong to limit the power of slave-owners
the 3/5 compromise was removed from the Constitution by constitutional amendment
do you favor a constitutional amendment to eliminate freedom of religion?
it's worth noting that TTF was originally formed to support the school board of Montgomery County when they imposed a certain view of homosexuality on the students with a advocacy-based sex ed curriculum
that curriculum was ruled an unconstitutional attack on religious belief by the courts and had to be rewritten
A former member of Donald Trump’s White House coronavirus task force has lifted the lid on what went down behind the scenes when the then-president talked on national TV last year about injecting disinfectant to combat the coronavirus.
“We’re in shock. You could see everyone looking around the room, saying, ‘Did he really just say that?’” recalled Olivia Troye, a former aide to then-Vice President Mike Pence, in a video released Saturday by the Republican Accountability Project, an anti-Trump conservative organization.
Troye said the task force on April 23, 2020, had wanted to communicate during its televised presser “that the mitigations and the 45 days to slow the spread had worked and the numbers had dropped.”
But Trump got excited by a pre-press conference briefing from the Department of Homeland Security that showed “sunshine and cleaners could potentially reduce the number of hours that a virus can live on a surface.”
Addressing the media soon after, Trump suggested testing “very powerful light” inside the body and disinfectant given “by injection” as ways to kill the virus.
“After the press briefing, Dr. [Deborah] Birx (Trump’s COVID-19 response coordinator) walks through the door and looks straight at me and says, ‘Why was he talking to me? I have nothing to do with that setting. He just threw away all of the work we’ve done,’” recalled Troye, who was in the room next to where Trump was making his comments.
Trump later claimed his comments were “sarcastic,” but Troye remembered the fallout ― having to think of how best to mitigate people taking Trump at his word and subsequent reports of people swallowing or gargling bleach to ward off COVID-19.
“Trump and Trumpism still has a strong hold on the Republican Party. He has hinted at running in 2024. That is why we need to remember moments like this,” Troye concluded. “Because we can’t allow him or someone like him to ever hold power again.”
"when they imposed a certain view of homosexuality."
MCPC comprehensive health curriculum
Goal
Comprehensive Health Education emphasizes lifelong positive health related attitudes and behaviors that promote self-reliance and self-regulation for all students while promoting health literacy.
Health literate students have the knowledge, skills, and ability to maintain and enhance personal health and fitness, create and maintain safe environments, and manage personal and community resources.
Life skills emphasized throughout the program include goal-setting; decision-making; identifying beliefs, attitudes, and motivations; assessing information; and advocacy for personal, family and community health.
a lot of edu-babble words that can be used to justify the imposition of a set of values that should be left to the student's own consideration
the original curriculum was thrown out because it was clear from the preparation materials given teachers that the county wanted teachers to promote the view that religions that consider homosexuality to be a sin are abhorrent
of course, the county has now determined that they could do that without putting down anything in writing
"the county wanted teachers to promote the view that religions that consider homosexuality to be a sin are abhorrent"
Sure it did... in your twisted imagination where anything you can dream up is an affront to your "Christian" sensibilities.
"Sure it did... in your twisted imagination where anything you can dream up is an affront to your "Christian" sensibilities."
well, I don't think I expressed any "Christian sensibilities."
the court's ruling was clear, as was its reasoning
either the imagination, or, possibly, ignorance are all yours
February 1, 2008
Circuit Court for Montgomery County Rules in Favor of Montgomery County Public Schools in Challenge to Health Education Lessons
Montgomery County Circuit Court Judge William J. Rowan III ruled in favor of Montgomery County Public Schools today, February 1, 2008, in a challenge brought by Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum and other opponents to revised health education lessons taught in eighth and tenth grades.
On January 16, the Montgomery County Circuit Court heard oral arguments in Citizens for Responsible Curriculum v. Montgomery County Board of Education, the long-running challenge to the revisions of the comprehensive health education curriculum.
"We hope that we can put this litigation behind us now once and for all and move forward with our primary mission—educating our children," said Dr. Jerry D. Weast, superintendent of schools. "Unfortunately, a small group of opponents has forced us to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend this curriculum in legal proceedings. We have successfully implemented this curriculum in our middle and high schools and it has been well-received by our parents, students and staff with 97 percent of tenth graders and 95 percent of eighth graders choosing to participate in the lessons."
The Montgomery County Board of Education approved the lessons for implementation in middle and high schools on June 12, 2007. The opponents asked the State Board of Education to prevent implementation and the State Board rejected their request. The Montgomery County Circuit Court Case was an appeal of the State Board’s decision.
The eighth and tenth grade lessons comprises two 45-minute sessions in each grade on respecting differences in human sexuality. The purpose of the curriculum is to promote tolerance, empathy and respect for all people regardless of sexual orientation. The curriculum also defines terms related to sexual orientation.
In addition, the tenth grade curriculum includes one 45-minute lesson and one video detailing the correct usage of a condom. The purpose of the condom demonstration lesson is to show proper application of a condom, while emphasizing that abstinence is the only 100 percent effective method of preventing sexually transmitted infections and pregnancy.
For students to participate in the lessons, parents must provide informed written consent in advance. It is important to note that all parents have the opportunity to review the health curriculum at parent meetings before the health classes are taught. Students who do not have parental consent participate in alternative lessons on different health topics. Parents overwhelmingly have chosen to have their children participate in the lessons this year. In fact, 95 percent of eighth graders participated in the lessons last October and 97 percent of tenth graders participated in the lessons last month.
I’m sure you all remember the endless media forays into so-called Trump country after the 2016 election to find out what “the country” was really thinking. The media were fascinated by the fact that Donald Trump managed to pull off his narrow electoral win in places none of them had ever been so they sent out intrepid reporters to rural towns and small cities in the rust belt to find out what Real Americans™️ were thinking. And they went back every few months for years to take the temperature of these folks who always said the same thing: they just loved Trump and supported him no matter what. Trump’s supporters believed with all their hearts that everything the press reported about him was a lie and the whole country was really with them if only the media would tell the truth about it. After all, just about everyone they knew and everyone on Facebook were in total agreement.
So sure, the media was fascinated by this phenomenon and that’s understandable to some extent. It was quite weird. But one might have thought it would be at least somewhat interesting to check in with the other side to see what they were thinking in the months after the recent election. It was quite eventful, after all. Yet you probably won’t be surprised to learn that there haven’t been many forays into the same states that Biden narrowly won. When NBC News did take a trip into the wilds of Pennsylvania recently to see how Biden voters are faring, they found that rather than the worshipful adoration of the Trump voters, most Biden voters have a very different reaction:
"Robin Westcott remembers her joy when Joe Biden was elected last fall. Not only had Biden won with a narrow victory in Pennsylvania, but he also had carried Erie County, where Westcott has lived for most of her 62 years. Once reliably Democratic in presidential elections, the voters here in 2016 broke for Donald Trump — the first time they favored a Republican White House hopeful since Ronald Reagan in 1984. The county, which pokes out from the northwesternmost corner of the state and into Lake Erie, became something of a Rorschach test for the Rust Belt…
Nearly 100 days into the Biden presidency, voters who backed him in this political battleground-within-a battleground say they feel a sense of relief."
Or, as one man told NBC News pollsters last week:
“I don’t have to think about what Joe Biden is doing every day,” said a North Carolina man who voted for Biden. “The best thing about Joe Biden is I don’t have to think about Joe Biden.”
In line with those anecdotal sentiments, a spate of public polls was released this past weekend in the run-up to Biden’s 100-day mark, and they all show Biden to have an approval rating ranging from 52% in the ABC poll to 58% in the CBS poll. There is widespread approval for his COVID response, his infrastructure policy and the economy. Unsurprisingly, Biden does poorly on immigration and guns, both of which are intractable issues that have critics among both Democrats and Republicans. And he hasn’t managed to unify the country which is, of course, something he should have been able to do with a flick of his wrist — or maybe a magic wand?
All in all, Biden is doing well, particularly considering that he was given almost no transition time to prepare and had to hit the ground running to deal with a historic catastrophe that killed over half a million people and isn’t over yet.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/203198/presidential-approval-ratings-donald-trump.aspx
https://news.gallup.com/poll/329384/presidential-approval-ratings-joe-biden.aspx
“The best thing about Joe Biden is I don’t have to think about Joe Biden.”
that about says it all
he's basically a big zero
people need to start paying attention though
he's about to overcharge a healthy economy with a 2 trillion dollar "infrastructure" package, causing inflation,
and cause a recession with a whopping increase capital gains tax
think Jimmy Carter deja vu
"All in all, Biden is doing well,"
not really
his approval rating is behind all recent Presidents other than Trump. at this point in their terms
Trump had abrasiveness as a strategy and it probably would have worked had it not been for the Chinese viral attack
"Montgomery County Circuit Court Judge William J. Rowan III ruled in favor of Montgomery County Public Schools today, February 1, 2008, in a challenge brought by Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum and other opponents to revised health education lessons taught in eighth and tenth grades."
this was the second go 'round
MCPS lost the first try and had to scrap a curriculum that was ruled unconstitutional and then write a new one, with their intent more cleverly disguised
"he's basically a big zero"
Biden is zero threat to our democracy.
You cannot say the same about rump without lying.
"MCPS lost the first try and had to scrap a curriculum that was ruled unconstitutional and then write a new one, with their intent more cleverly disguised"
And the most recent revision is so much more thorough.
Good job getting that first revision thrown out.
"Biden is zero threat to our democracy."
actually, he is, in so many ways
the moves to placate China alone threatens not just our democracy but all democracy, forever
technology has made a regime like Orwell's 1984 feasible and Bejing is trying mightily to export just such a system
"You cannot say the same about rump without lying."
Your fascination with asses tells us all we need to know
Trump is gone
if you continue to let him be the standard by which you judge everything else, you really don't have much to say
"And the most recent revision is so much more thorough.
Good job getting that first revision thrown out."
I took no part in the whole thing so I didn't do any kind of job
still, the fact remain that TTF supported the unconstitutional first curriculum
worth keeping in mind as you read TTF comments on religious freedom now
BREAKING: Fox host ADMITS he lied about Biden “scandal” live on air.
Who needs facts when you can hysterically fear monger about phantom scandals like beef rationing and compulsory plant-based diets?
To White House aides, the wholly fictional Biden-will-ban-hamburgers story line was in part an amusing flare-up perpetuated by Republicans who have struggled to find ways to successfully attack the president. They joked privately that White House press secretary Jen Psaki should start her daily press briefing by eating a burger.
But the not-quite-red-meat attack also offers a case study in how a falsehood can rapidly metastasize among Republicans — pushed not only by the party’s fringe but also by more mainstream voices, like former South Carolina governor and potential 2024 hopeful Nikki Haley. The argument dovetails with a common claim on the right that Democrats are out to ban meat-eating, whether for reasons of health or climate.
And the episode underscores how the shadow of Donald Trump’s presidency — rife with misinformation and mistruths and lies — still lingers, providing Republicans with a mendacious road map for demonizing a political rival. The nation experienced 30,573 false or misleading claims over Trump’s four years in office, according to The Washington Post Fact Checker — culminating in the baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen, which ultimately helped provoke the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
The falsehood began with a Daily Mail article Thursday, titled, “How Biden’s climate plan could limit you to eat just one burger a MONTH.” While noting that Biden has “yet to release any firm details” on his plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, the article speculated on some ways Biden could achieve his goals. It cited a University of Michigan study that found that Americans reducing their meat consumption would help lower the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.
The academic study does not mention Biden and was published before he was inaugurated, but that didn’t stop the Daily Mail from baselessly asserting that Biden’s climate plan “would require Americans to only consume about four pounds of red meat per year, or 0.18 ounces per day.”
With that, the conservative stampede began. Larry Kudlow, a former top economic adviser to Trump, warned on his Fox Business show Friday that Americans would have to forgo meat on the Fourth of July if Biden gets his way.
Burger-gate kept spreading through the weekend. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) dubbed Biden “The Hamburglar,” while Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) tweeted that Biden should “stay out of my kitchen.” Donald Trump Jr. retweeted the Fox News graphic, writing, “I’m pretty sure I ate 4 pounds of red meat yesterday. That’s going to be a hard NO from me.” And on Sunday, Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) tweeted that “Not only does Emperor Biden not want us to celebrate the 4th of July, now he doesn’t want us to have a burger on that day either.”
Both Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Idaho Gov. Brad Little shared the Fox News graphic on Twitter, with Abbott proclaiming, “Not gonna happen in Texas!” and Little writing, “Idahoans also have beef with this agenda and for dinner!”
Haley, meanwhile, retweeted a meme that her Stand For America political action committee pushed out, featuring Texas’s iconic “Come and Take It” flag, now repurposed to show a burger dripping cheese instead of the cannon. “Oh, I’m sorry, I thought this was America,” read the caption on the group’s tweet.
Inconvenient truth: A review of the White House Mess menu reveals a “West Wing Burger” — a “house blend” beefy patty with lettuce, tomatoes, onions, and a pickle for $7 — or, for an additional $1, with cheese.
a report published by the University of Michigan Center for Sustainable Systems that looked at how much of a reduction would result from various dietary changes. As reported by the Center for Biological Diversity, the researchers concluded:
That replacing half of all animal-based foods with plant-based alternatives would reduce diet-related emissions by 35%. And if half of all animal-based foods were replaced with plant-based alternatives and beef consumption fell by 90%, dietary emissions would drop by 51%. If American diets remain unchanged, emissions associated with producing the food we eat will climb 9% by 2030.
since this is part of the New Green Deal thinking, some speculated that Biden's plan would have this SINCE HE DIDN'T RELEASE DETAILS
if he doesn't want to be misunderstood, he should be clear
he's vague because he's trying to cater to the global warming nuts in his coalition
"the shadow of Donald Trump’s presidency — rife with misinformation and mistruths and lies"
you must be kidding
the Dems told non-stop lies about Trump. here's a few:
1. he conspired with the Russians in the 2016 election
2. he told people to drink bleach to cure COVID
3. he said white supremacists were good people
4. he said all Mexicans were rapists and drug dealers
A D.C. Metropolitan Police officer left brain injured by Capitol rioters on Tuesday slammed ex-President Donald Trump and the other politicians who have falsely portrayed the mob as peaceful.
Michael Fanone, a 19-year police veteran who was dragged down stairs, beaten with pipes and repeatedly shocked with stun guns during the pro-Trump insurrection, talked about the distortions in an emotional interview with CNN’s Don Lemon.
“It’s been very difficult seeing elected officials and other individuals kind of whitewash the events that day, or downplay what happened,” Fanone said when Lemon asked about Trump’s claim that the rioters posed “zero threat.” “Some of the terminology that was used, like ‘hugs and kisses,’ and ‘very fine people,’ is very different from what I experienced and what my co-workers experienced on the 6th.”
Trump said during an interview on Fox News last month that his supporters were hugging and kissing police officers and were unthreatening.
Fanone said that was “very much not the experience that I had.”
“I experienced a group of individuals that were trying to kill me to accomplish their goal,” he said, choking up. “I experienced the most brutal, savage, hand-to-hand combat of my entire life. Let alone my policing career, which spans almost two decades.”
He said he hoped that people would understand the depths of the insurrectionists’ motives.
“I want people to understand that thousands of rioters came to the Capitol hell-bent on violence and destruction and murder,” he said.
Fanone was guarding a Capitol hallway when the Trump rioters dragged him from his post, hauled him down a stairway, shocked him repeatedly with a stun gun and beat him with metal pipes. He suffered a heart attack and a concussion and has since been living with a traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.
More than 400 people have been charged in the riot, including several who are implicated in the attack against Fanone. Charges have been filed against Thomas Sibick, Kyle Young, Albuquerque Head and Daniel Rodriguez.
Some leading Republicans have joined Trump in pushing false accounts of the insurrection, downplaying the violence that led to five deaths and hundreds of law enforcement injuries after Trump urged supporters to march on the Capitol to overturn the election.
"Trump said during an interview on Fox News last month that his supporters were hugging and kissing police officers and were unthreatening."
there were tens of thousands there
the numbers who entered the Capitol were in the hundreds
and among some, the scene Trump described did occur
sorry, reality doesn't fit your simplistic propaganda
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/nyregion/cuomo-aides-nursing-home-deaths.html?
Watch Kevin McCarthy invoke the lie that Biden wants to ban burgers which are sold in the White House mess.
See the beefy menu here:
https://whitehouse.gov1.info/white-house-mess/
"and among some, the scene Trump described did occur"
"There is no evidence that the rioters hugged or kissed officers. Trump may have been referring to footage of a Capitol Police officer taking a selfie with one of the insurrectionists and some officers appearing to allow the crowd into the building. "
Prove it. Let's see the photographs and videos of the right wing idiots who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, "hugging and kissing police officers and were [being] unthreatening."
Provide links to your proof.
I'll even help you search:
https://wtop.com/gallery/dc/photos-pro-trump-supporters-rally-in-dc/
https://abcnews.go.com/alerts/us-capitol-breach
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-falsely-claims-capitol-rioters-were-hugging-and-kissing-police-2021-3
"Watch Kevin McCarthy invoke the lie that Biden wants to ban burgers which are sold in the White House mess."
Biden has aligned himself with the radical elements of the Dem party
he shouldn't be surprised to associated with their ideas, unless he chooses to disavow them
that's the standard you applied to Trump
"See the beefy menu here:
https://whitehouse.gov1.info/white-house-mess/"
oh, even after the Green Dealers ban beef, I'm sure they'll still have on the menu at the White House menu
the Biden White House is hypocrisy central
"There is no evidence that the rioters hugged or kissed officers. Trump may have been referring to footage of a Capitol Police officer taking a selfie with one of the insurrectionists and some officers appearing to allow the crowd into the building. "
"hugged or kissed" is simply a rhetorical device
he just meant that there were many cops and rioters hitting it off very well
literalism is the last refuge to which the scoundrel clings
there were a handful of rioters that attacked a couple of cops, although it was recently determined that the one who died passed away from unrelated causes
and there was one cop that used deadly force without cause and shot a protester dead
No links to proof of your accusations yet again.
No surprise there.
You'll just keep lying!
It's all you've got.
accusations?
who did I accuse of anything?
btw, the reason Biden has a worse approval rating than any other modern President, other than the strategically abrasive Trump, is that he lied
he said he would be a centrist that returned the country to normalcy and, instead, he has pursued a far left agenda
he plans on spending 6 trillion dollars and taxing profitability out of the economy
and having the government take over all aspects of our lives
you probably thought it was your choice to smoke a menthol cigarette if you wanted
it's just a dress rehearsal for things to come
Joe Biden’s first address to a joint session of Congress drew 22.6 million viewers across seven major networks. The bulk of Biden’s audience — 18.5 million — were 55 and older.
That’s a drop of 47% from 43 million or so who tuned in to Donald Trump’s first speech to a joint session, on February. 28, 2017, across those seven networks.
It's good for Dems that fewer watched, and that many will dead in 2024. Socialism in never popular.
As the proposals kept coming — all the spending Biden wants, all the taxes he wants to raise (only on the rich, of course), all the things he wants to do to affect every conceivable area of the economy and our common life as a nation — what sounded rational at the outset of the speech started seeming a mite delusional.
After a time, one simply lost track of the sheer numbers of government programs Biden wanted to create, fund and add funding to and the kinds of new regulations he said he wanted to impose on private industry.
The answer Biden gave to the question of what to do now that the pandemic is over is: more. We must do more. He praised Congress for supplying $1,400 stimulus checks to 165 million households before making it clear that we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
He talked about jobs, jobs, jobs created by government, government, government, through spending, spending, spending. And yet he also declared that “America is on the move again,” and indeed it is.
The key sign is that job creation is through the roof, and the unemployment rate is falling vertiginously on its own. Those numbers would be even better, except that employers are complaining they are finding it hard to hire workers because unemployment benefits supplied by Biden’s coronavirus relief package are so lavish that people don’t have to return to work so quickly.
This is exactly the problem with the kind of unthinkably huge government surge Biden is seeking — he wants to commit this country to more than $4 trillion in new federal largesse on top of the $2 trillion he and his party have already spent.
He is putting the government in competition with the private sector for resources, money and workers — the very competition that threatens an inflationary spiral of a kind we haven’t seen in more than four decades. But don’t worry — these are “once-in-a-lifetime investments,” and government will only “buy American.”
He made a big deal about electric cars and charging stations. But if electric cars are truly viable and represent the future, government need do very little — the profits that can be generated by them will be sought and achieved by the private economy.
How do I know this? In 2007, the oil-extraction approach called “fracking” came online and in just a few years, private interests were building multibillion-dollar shipping systems to export the oil entirely on their own. Liberals hate fracking and don’t want to see it as a model. They love electric cars and want government to make them and subsidize them and control them.
The love of government spending always means that not enough is being done. For example, Biden in his speech basically said we could cure cancer if we just spent more money and created a new division of the National Institutes of Health to come up with innovative new medical stuff.
Well, first, we already spend $6 billion a year on the National Cancer Institute. Since Richard Nixon declared a “war on cancer” in 1971, the NCI has gone through more than $100 billion in taxpayer dollars. At the same time, private interests — primarily pharmaceutical companies — spend billions each year on research and development into cancer treatments.
But to hear Biden tell it, not enough hasn’t been done — when in fact, wondrous advancements have come from this research, among them the understanding that cancer is 100 different diseases, not just one. In that sense, “finding the cure for cancer” is the wrong quest. But it sounds good.
If you were still awake when he said it
Aa solid majority approve of Biden's job performance and, in many cases, his policy choices draw even higher approval ratings.
The CBS/YouGov poll released before Wednesday’s address showed Biden’s approval at 58 percent with 42 percent disapproval, roughly the same as Morning Consult’s most recent poll (57 approval and 39 percent disapproval). Morning Consult also reports that 67 percent say Biden’s handling the pandemic is going very well or somewhat well, while CBS/YouGov reports that he drew 58 percent approval for his infrastructure plan, 57 percent for his handling of the economy and 55 percent for race relations. By a stunning 77 percent to 23 percent, Americans approve of his withdrawal from Afghanistan.
In a further warning sign to Republicans, who have flailed away trying to diminish Biden’s standing, Americans by a 40 percentage-point margin (70 percent to 30 percent) want Republicans to find common ground with him. Sixty-one percent say they are not doing so. Meanwhile, 58 percent think Biden is at least trying to work with congressional Republicans.
The public’s view of him personally remains a solid asset. Some 62 percent consider him presidential and 56 percent see him as knowledgeable, competent and effective. This is in stark contrast to his predecessor, who botched handling of the pandemic. Perhaps the most insightful polling question asked what Americans wanted from politics. The most popular responses were normalcy (41 percent) and steadiness (44 percent).
Biden’s fundamental decisions have paid off, including going big on plans, acting cordially toward Republicans (even if not reciprocated), bolstering alliances but curtailing military action and coming across as a reasonable, decent human being. But voters’ support is conditional: Biden will be under pressure to pass his two big economic plans, keep out of foreign conflicts, maintain his congenial outlook and guide the economy to recovery.
There is plenty that can go wrong. Fortunately for Biden, Republicans seem to be stumbling in the dark. They are perceived as obstructionists. They oppose very popular policies. They talk about nonsense that does not interest voters (e.g., a mythical ban on red meat) and lack anyone remotely resembling a “happy warrior.” And they are still tethered to the overwhelmingly unpopular and permanently disgraced former president.
There have been plenty of rankings and ratings for Biden’s first hundred days. As Politico reported: “Eighty-five percent of Democrats polled gave Biden an ‘A’ or ‘B’ grade for his first 100 days in office, while 44 percent of independents surveyed gave Biden the same marks. That’s more independent and intraparty support for Biden than former President Donald Trump got in his first 100 days, when just 32 percent of independents surveyed and 72 percent of Republicans polled gave Trump either an ‘A’ or a ‘B.’ ” But when it comes to Republicans, it is hard to deliver anything but failing marks. At some point, they will need a message, an agenda and a respected party leader.
everything about Biden is a fraud
the media is an accomplice
but Americans won't be fooled forever
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/bidens-con-against-america/
Biden is a genuinely nice guy.
Rump is the fraud and the GOP is right there with him.
"Trump is gone"
Ya think?
Republican Lawmakers Make Florida Trek to Win Over Trump's Support Ahead of 2022
2/20/21 AT 6:00 AM EST
Republicans flock to Mar-a-Lago for Trump fundraising, photo-ops
March 15, 2021, 9:57 PM
Trump, GOP hosting big-money Mar-a-Lago blowout
April 10, 2021 | 12:48pm
Mar-a-Lago primary: Missouri Republicans seek Trump’s favor with open Senate seat
APRIL 26, 2021 05:00 AM, UPDATED APRIL 26, 2021 09:19 AM
Judge Slaps Down Election Recount Firm Hired By Arizona GOP Senate
Cyber Ninjas was ordered to cough up its playbook for a 2020 election recount headed by a disciple of Donald Trump’s “Stop The Steal” lie.
A private company hired by Arizona’s Republican Senate to do another presidential recount has been smacked down by a judge for battling to keep the process secret.
The Cyber Ninjas company — headed by a conspiracy theorist and disciple of the “Stop the Steal” lie that the presidential election was rigged — has no election or balloting experience. Its lawyer argued in court this week that it could not reveal its “trade secrets” on how it would conduct the recount, and wanted to bar oversight of its audit process.
But Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Daniel Martin said he was concerned “that the rights of the voters in Maricopa County” be protected and ordered Cyber Ninjas to turn over documents explaining the methods being used to review the 2.1 million 2020 ballots cast in the county, which includes Phoenix. The recount began last week.
The recount result appears headed for a foregone conclusion. Months before the process started, Cyber Ninjas owner Doug Logan retweeted messages claiming that an audit would find hundreds of thousands of new votes for Donald Trump.
The Washington Post reported Thursday that Trump asks “multiple times a day” about Cyber Ninjas recount updates. He’s reportedly transfixed by the operation’s examination of the ballots with ultraviolet light, which some experts believe could damage them, according to the Post.
In documents Cyber Ninjas turned over in response to the court order, there’s nothing explaining the point of examining ballots by UV light, according to the Arizona Republic.
Voter and civil rights groups, including the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, sent a letter to the Department of Justice on Thursday asking for federal monitors, saying the ballots are in danger of theft, defacement or damage.
Company workers have been spotted examining ballots with blue pens in their hands. Recounters are only allowed red pens. Arizona’s Elections Procedural Manual states that anyone involved in a ballot recount cannot use pens with blue or black ink, which can be read by ballot tabulator machines and could be used to change ballots or render them unreadable.
Arizona Republic reporter Jen Fifield, who was watching the recount, pointed out the pen violation last week to Logan, who was on the scene. He argued with her, then discovered she was correct and promised to “work on” the issue, she said.
The company’s findings will have no effect on President Joe Biden’s victory in the state by a 0.3-point margin, which has long been officially certified.
But if auditors claim to find new votes for Trump, it will throw further doubt on a legitimate election — the kind of falsehood that fueled the pro-Trump Capitol riot on Jan. 6.
“I’m very concerned this has ramifications for every state in the country,” Kim Wyman, the Republican secretary of state in Washington state, told the Post. “This is politicizing an administrative process with no real structure, or laws or rules in place to guide how it goes.”
It threatens to create a future in which a controlling party can always challenge results, and “people will no longer have confidence that we have fair elections,” Wyman added.
So one of Rump's cronies wants to have access to Arizona ballots while using black and blue pens and he wants to make sure no one is watching them.
Why... that doesn't sound suspicious at all!
Somebody needs to throw these traitorous morons in jail.
At the historic 100-day mark, Americans largely approve of his presidency. In fact, Biden’s overall approval rating has now climbed to 54 percent, the highest it has ever been in a Yahoo News/YouGov poll. His disapproval rating stands at just 37 percent.
In contrast, Trump’s approval rating never averaged more than 48 percent, a peak he reached 5 days into his tenure; at 100 days, 53 percent of Americans disapproved of Trump’s performance while just 42 percent approved. A majority of Americans continued to disapprove of Trump for the remainder of his presidency.
When Biden took office, he bet that voters would judge his presidency on one thing and one thing only: his approach to COVID-19 and the economic damage it has inflicted. To date, their assessment has been overwhelmingly positive, and Biden’s emphasis on these issues appears to be driving his overall popularity.
A full 57 percent of Americans, for instance, approve of the way Biden has handled the pandemic, and even more say they favor the three main goals Biden set for his first 100 days (and then largely achieved): passing a COVID-19 relief package (64 percent favor, 20 percent oppose); administering 200 million COVID-19 vaccines in 100 days (67 percent favor, 14 percent oppose); and reopening a majority of schools (62 percent favor, 15 percent oppose). Even 28 percent of Republicans approve of Biden’s work on COVID-19, more than approve of his approach to any other issue. Among independents, that number rises to 58 percent.
if you keep comparing Biden to Trump, you'll quite understand what's going and will be very surprised by the mid-term elections
the pandemic is the only area where more than half approve of Biden's performance
the agenda Biden outlined in his speech to Congress will be a disaster for Dems, if enacted
Dems have a slim majority in the House, which is destined to be shaved thinner by the census results alone, so they don't have a lot of open space to take big risks
America doesn't want the government to take over their lives
they voted for a return to normality, not government engineered socialism
An Arizona Republic reporter was ejected Friday during an audit of the state’s presidential ballots after he snapped a photo of U.S. Capitol rally agitator and former Arizona Rep. Anthony Kern (R) reviewing ballots.
Kern’s own name is also on the ballots he was auditing. He ran for reelection last year and placed last in the three-way race, losing his seat. He was also listed as a presidential elector for Donald Trump, according to the Republic.
The review of 2.1 million votes cast in Maricopa County is only auditing the tally for the presidency and the U.S. Senate, the races won by Democrats.
Kern has insisted that Trump’s defeat was fraudulent. While he was still a representative, he signed a “joint resolution” with fellow Republican lawmakers in a bid to invalidate the state’s election results.
Kern was photographed in the crowd during the Jan. 6 siege in Washington, the Arizona Republic reported.
More than 40 Democrats in the Arizona state Legislature called on the Justice Department to investigate Kern after the Capitol siege. His “own social media posts strongly suggest” that Kern was “present at the riot in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, and actively encouraged the mob, both before and during the attack on the Capitol,” the letter said.
He later “blamed antifa,” the letter noted.
Kern refused to turn over his cellphone so investigators could examine his emails and text messages related to his travel to the Capitol that day, Newsweek reported.
Kern has denied any wrongdoing.
*cough*
Oh yeah, I believe him, don't you?
Over all, the broadest measure of the economy — gross domestic product — grew by 1.6 percent in the first three months of 2021, compared with 1.1 percent in the final quarter of last year. On an annualized basis, the first-quarter growth rate was 6.4 percent.
Total economic output should return to prepandemic levels by summer — in fact, Mr. Daco believes it has already done so. His firm estimates that the economy will expand by 3.1 percent in the second quarter, or about 13 percent on an annual basis. For the year, it expects growth of 7.5 percent, the best performance since 1951.
“This may be the tip of the iceberg,” Mr. Daco said. “I think we will see much stronger momentum into summer as health conditions continue to improve, policy support remains in place and employment strengthens.”
Helped by several rounds of government relief payments, households were sitting on a collective $4.1 trillion in savings in the first quarter, up from $1.2 trillion before the pandemic began.
That should find its way into the economy as services that were mostly off-limits come to life and customers flock to reopened establishments. Mr. Daco expects consumer spending to grow by more than 9 percent this year, a record.
Consumer spending rose 2.6 percent in the first three months of the year, with a 5.4 percent increase in purchases of goods accounting for most of the growth. Spending on services, which has slumped throughout the pandemic, rose by 1.1 percent.
“This demonstrates the value of government intervention when the economy is on its knees from Covid,” said Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. “But in the coming quarters, the economy will be much less dependent on stimulus as individuals use the savings they’ve accumulated during the pandemic.”
The economy’s underlying strength has been evident in the robust corporate earnings that many companies have been reporting in recent days. After the stock market closed Thursday, Amazon announced that its profit more than tripled last quarter to over $8 billion, while sales jumped 44 percent to $108.5 billion.
One striking aspect of the quarter’s economic activity was spending on motor vehicles and parts, which increased by almost 13 percent from the previous three months. Strong consumer demand and tight inventories drove prices higher.
The unemployment rate for high school graduates was 6.7 percent in March, while it stands at 3.7 percent for Americans who hold a college degree. Members of minority groups have also suffered heavily, with the jobless rate for Black Americans at 9.6 percent, compared with 5.4 percent for whites.
Still, hiring does seem to be catching up. Last month, employers added 916,000 jobs and the unemployment rate fell to 6 percent, while initial claims for unemployment benefits have dropped sharply in recent weeks. On Thursday, the Labor Department reported that initial claims for state unemployment benefits had fallen to the lowest level of the pandemic for the third consecutive week.
Tom Gimbel, chief executive of LaSalle Network, a recruiting and staffing firm in Chicago, said: “It’s the best job market I’ve seen in 25 years. We have 50 percent more openings now than we did pre-Covid.”
Hiring is stronger for junior to midlevel positions, he said, with strong demand for professionals in accounting, financing, marketing and sales, among other areas. “Companies are building up their back-office support and supply chains,” he said. “I think we’re good for at least 18 months to two years.”
Ample savings and rising consumer optimism are giving businesses the confidence to bet on the future as well. Business investment rose 2.4 percent in the first quarter and surpassed its prepandemic level. Residential construction spending rose 2.6 percent.
“We’re at the opening stages of what could be a very strong six to nine months for the U.S. economy as it emerges from the pandemic,” he said. “The best is still yet to come.”
Statement About Dr. Eric Coomer, Director of Product Strategy and Security at Dominion Voting Systems
Friday, 30 April 2021 03:30 PM
Since Election Day, various guests, attorneys, and hosts on Newsmax have offered opinions and claims about Dr. Eric Coomer, the Director of Product Strategy and Security at Dominion Voting Systems.
Newsmax would like to clarify its coverage of Dr. Coomer and note that while Newsmax initially covered claims by President Trump’s lawyers, supporters and others that Dr. Coomer played a role in manipulating Dominion voting machines, Dominion voting software, and the final vote counts in the 2020 presidential election, Newsmax subsequently found no evidence that such allegations were true. Many of the states whose results were contested by the Trump campaign after the November 2020 election have conducted extensive recounts and audits, and each of these states certified the results as legal and final.
There are several facts that our viewers should be aware of. Newsmax has found no evidence that Dr. Coomer interfered with Dominion voting machines or voting software in any way, nor that Dr. Coomer ever claimed to have done so. Nor has Newsmax found any evidence that Dr. Coomer ever participated in any conversation with members of “Antifa,” nor that he was directly involved with any partisan political organization.
On behalf of Newsmax, we would like to apologize for any harm that our reporting of the allegations against Dr. Coomer may have caused to Dr. Coomer and his family. For more on this, please go to our website at Newsmax.com, and read Facts About Dominion, Smartmatic You Should Know.”
© 2021 Newsmax. All rights reserved.
How nice to see a liar take accountability for their lies.
"Kern has insisted that Trump’s defeat was fraudulent"
it's a big country
you can find someone who thinks just about anything
so what?
problem is the Dems used the pandemic as an excuse to remove all rules protecting election security
then they won the election
and now they want to immortalize the changes made that were intended to be temporary
hence, historians will always consider the results of the 2020 election as dubious
"Kern has denied any wrongdoing.
*cough*
Oh yeah, I believe him, don't you?"
like all rational people, I don't care
"Over all, the broadest measure of the economy — gross domestic product — grew by 1.6 percent in the first three months of 2021, compared with 1.1 percent in the final quarter of last year. On an annualized basis, the first-quarter growth rate was 6.4 percent."
surprised that you would post this since it shows Biden was lying in his speech to Congress
he said the economy he inherited was "a house on fire"
4.4% growth in the last quarter of 2020 would fit no definition of "a house on fire"
kind of like he was dishonest when he came into office and said his goal was 100 million shots in his first 100 days
truth is, when he took office, the US was already inoculating a million a day
"Total economic output should return to prepandemic levels by summer — in fact, Mr. Daco believes it has already done so. His firm estimates that the economy will expand by 3.1 percent in the second quarter, or about 13 percent on an annual basis. For the year, it expects growth of 7.5 percent, the best performance since 1951.
“This may be the tip of the iceberg,” Mr. Daco said. “I think we will see much stronger momentum into summer as health conditions continue to improve, policy support remains in place and employment strengthens.”"
thanks, Captain Obvious
just because you're saying what everyone else is, there no proof you aren't brilliant
LOL!!!!
"Helped by several rounds of government relief payments, households were sitting on a collective $4.1 trillion in savings in the first quarter, up from $1.2 trillion before the pandemic began."
only a fool thinks he's rich because he maxxed out his credit card
today's young people will spend the rest of their lives paying for the 6 trillion Biden is borrowing
"That should find its way into the economy as services that were mostly off-limits come to life and customers flock to reopened establishments."
thanks to Trump's Operation Warp Speed
remember, the vaccine were completed and approved before Biden took office
go back to the 2012 Democratic convention
the theme of most speeches was that Obama couldn't be blamed for the bad economy because, four years later, it was all Bush's fault
and, in January 2019, with an economy humming and minority unemployment at its lowest level in history, Dems said, three years after he left, Obama should get the credit
now, 100 days into Biden's presidency, he should get credit that the economy is making a strong recovery
LOL!!!!!!!
it's amazing Dems get out of their houses every morning
must be hell getting those long noses out the front door
"How nice to see a liar take accountability for their lies."
covering a story is not lying
updating it is not admitting to lying
As far-right demonstrators gathered outside the Oregon Capitol in December in the hope of ending coronavirus restrictions, state Rep. Mike Nearman (R) appeared to deliberately allow entry to two men trying to breach the building as he was leaving.
Without hesitation, two rioters on Dec. 21 rushed inside the state Capitol in Salem, Ore., held doors open and signaled for others to come in before police arrived to cut off the security breach, according to surveillance video obtained by the Oregonian and Oregon Public Broadcasting.
Nearman, 57, now faces criminal charges for his role in allegedly allowing the rioters to breach the Oregon Capitol, Marion County District Attorney Paige E. Clarkson announced Friday. The GOP lawmaker has been charged with misdemeanor counts of first-degree official misconduct and second-degree criminal trespass, according to court documents.
Prosecutors say Nearman — who was stripped of his committee assignments and has faced calls to resign in recent months — “unlawfully and knowingly” opened the door for the far-right group “with intent to obtain a benefit or to harm another.”
[See the security video for yourselves on YouTube]
“Rep. Nearman put every person in the Capitol in serious danger and created fear among Capitol staff and legislators,” tweeted Oregon House Speaker Tina Kotek (D) on Friday. “I called on him to resign in January and renew my call in light of today’s charges.”
Oregon Public Broadcasting reported that at least three of the men who took part at the far-right demonstration in Salem made the trip to the U.S. Capitol weeks later for the insurrection on Jan. 6.
Nearman did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday. In a statement in January, the Republican said he was the victim of “mob justice” and repeated his belief that the statehouse should be open.
“I don’t condone violence nor participate in it,” Nearman said in his January statement.
Although few Oregon Republicans have commented on the matter, the Oregonian reported that state House GOP Leader Christine Drazan said she supports a criminal investigation of the episode.
In a statement to The Washington Post on Saturday, Drazan said she trusts that the judicial process will be fair and objective.
“State legislators are the voices of their community,” Drazan said. “They are not above the law.”
"only a fool thinks he's rich because he maxxed out his credit card
today's young people will spend the rest of their lives paying for the 6 trillion Biden is borrowing"
We are still paying for Ronnie Raygun's tripling of the national debt. The only time this nation has come close to "paying as it goes" is when Clinton was president.
Republicans have taken to heart "Regan proved that deficits don't matter" as said out loud by Dick Cheney. Because their "goal is to shrink government to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub." And many Republicans have signed Grover Norquist's pledge to do just that.
So they pass massive corporate tax cuts that are far too large to be paid for by the subsequent small boosts in the economy. Increasing the debt even further.
The only time Republicans get serious about a balanced budget is when a Democrat is in the White House, and they are even willing to strangle the US economy trying to recover from Bush's economic collapse to try and make President Obama look bad.
Both of the last two Republican presidents left office after playing a major part in destroying the economy. Bush Sr. did a better job, only leaving us with a recession.
"and, in January 2019, with an economy humming and minority unemployment at its lowest level in history, Dems said, three years after he left, Obama should get the credit"
So you think Rump should get credit for a huge corporate tax cut that mostly went to buying back corporate stock and paying dividends? That doesn't put people to work, and with the huge loss in tax revenue, it added a trillion dollars to the deficit: https://www.thebalance.com/cost-of-trump-tax-cuts-4586645
Funny how you didn't complain about deficits then.
Obama added 8.1 million jobs to the market during his last 3 years in office, while Rump only added 6.6 million. While it is true that for a short time Rump managed to get unemployment to a half-century low, the unemployment rate still dropped faster under Obama. Perhaps if Rump hadn't started an unnecessary trade war with China, he could have kept up Obama's pace of economic improvement.
So let's give Rump all the credit he is due for slowing down Obama's record recovery, while still managing to convince gullible Republicans he did an "amazing" job.
As for the debt the US incurred during Obama's presidency, that came about partly due to a sudden half a trillion dollar annual drop in tax revenues. Like any reasonable President, he got some relief bills passed through Congress to blunt the collapse. After that, Republicans in Congress made sure he couldn't spend any more by hamstringing him with "sequestration." Obama managed to get the economy going again anyway.
Another reason we came out with more debt after Obama left office was him signing the bill that Congress passed to make the Bush tax cuts permanent. Those tax cuts didn't save Bush's economy, and ultimately only added to the deficit. But that didn't stop both the White House and Congress from doing them again.
We are still paying for the Bush tax cuts too, and will be for a long time.
Give credit where credit is due.
Right-wing attorney Lin Wood told his social media followers that he roamed the White House and found Donald Trump still there.
The Trump-loving lawyer bizarrely claimed to his 840,000 followers on Telegram that he was in the White House looking for President Joe Biden, but instead found Trump behind the Resolute Desk -- proving he was still president, reported The Daily Dot.
"I was right. No Joey in the Oval Office. But I did run into our President of the United States," Wood posted. "President Trump is hanging out and working in the office in which we re-elected him to serve in a historic landslide victory on November 3, 2020."
Wood posted photos of empty rooms in the White House and another of Trump seated in the Oval Office -- which he previously posted in February and was originally taken in March 2020 -- as "proof" of his claims.
The attorney, who's facing possible sanctions from the Georgia Bar Association, then shared a post from QAnon promoter GhostEzra, who claims Biden is actually dead and was replaced by a body double.
Even George Orwell couldn't dream this stuff up.
Bruce Jenner, the head of the transgenders in America, agrees that biological males shouldn't be allowed to compete against girls in sports contests:
https://twitter.com/Caitlyn_Jenner/status/1388585005199228928
"Without hesitation, two rioters on Dec. 21 rushed inside the state Capitol in Salem, Ore"
you post is missing key elements, such as why you call these demonstrators "rioters"
why exactly did they do other than enter a Capitol building during a pandemic?
compare them to the leftist mobs that burned down a police station in Portland and set up a zone of anarchy in Seattle
"We are still paying for Ronnie Raygun's tripling of the national debt. The only time this nation has come close to "paying as it goes" is when Clinton was president."
we were in a cold war when Reagan took office, and he won it
WWII resulted in worthwhile debt too
Biden is planning to increase the debt three times more in less than a year than Reagan did in his whole eight-year term
and Biden's goal is a massive takeover of the US economy by the government
this hasn't worked in Europe and the world loses if China overtakes us
"While it is true that for a short time Rump managed to get unemployment to a half-century low,"
it's the kind of jobs Trump created and the recipients that are significant
Dems purposely sabotaged the economy with the irrational pandemic response
even still, it had largely recovered before Biden took office
less than three months after Bidin' took office, he deserves credit for little other than bidin' his time
"Right-wing attorney Lin Wood told his social media followers that he roamed the White House and found Donald Trump still there."
there are nuts on all sides
to find some leftist ones, you simply need to read this blog
how much time do you spend scouring the internet for this irrelevant crap?
"the irrational pandemic response" was Rump telling us "It's going to disappear. One day it's like a miracle, it will disappear," President tRump said during a White House meeting with African-American leaders on Feb 27, 2020.
Search transcript for "miracle" here: https://www.c-span.org/video/?469815-1/white-house-roundtable-african-american-history-month
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Senator Susan Collins, a leading moderate Republican in the U.S. Congress, warned on Sunday against intolerance of differences within her party and pushed back at intraparty attacks from the right against Senator Mitt Romney and Representative Liz Cheney.
Collins, who won re-election in Maine last year despite a strong Democratic bid to oust her, said she was dismayed that Romney had been booed by fellow Republicans in his home state of Utah, and defended Cheney, who like Romney has been attacked from within the party for criticizing former President Donald Trump.
"We need to have room for a variety of views," Collins told CNN's "State of the Union" program. "We are not a party that is led by just one person."
"I was appalled," Collins added, that Romney was booed on Saturday at the Utah Republicans' state organizing convention.
"Mitt Romney is an outstanding senator who served his state and our country well," Collins said.
Republicans at the convention narrowly rejected a motion to censure Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, for voting to convict Trump at the former president's two impeachment trials, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.
The newspaper reported that Romney told the crowd, "I'm a man who says what he means, and you know I was not a fan of our last president's character issues."
Collins also praised Cheney, one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump this year on a charge of incitement of insurrection for a speech he gave before a mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
"Liz Cheney is a woman of strength and conscience, and she did what she thought was right, and I salute her for that," Collins said.
Cheney, the third-ranking House Republican and a daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, survived a February attempt to oust her from the House leadership.
In recent days, she has faced renewed pressure from conservatives in her party after she gave Democratic President Joe Biden a fist bump in the House chamber, where he gave a speech to Congress.
Representative Lance Gooden, a conservative Texas Republican, predicted on Saturday that Cheney would be out of her House leadership role by the end of May.
The Senate's third-ranking Republican, John Barrasso, also from Cheney's home state of Wyoming, told ABC's "This Week" program that Republicans "need to get beyond all this and focus on the 2022 elections," when asked about pressure to oust Cheney.
Collins and Romney were among seven Senate Republicans who voted in February to convict Trump at his second impeachment trial. A year earlier, Romney was the only Republican to vote to convict Trump on a charge of abuse of power related to the former president's request that Ukraine investigate Biden. The Senate acquitted Trump in both trials.
Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) threat to “woke” CEOs was slammed Sunday as likely the “most openly corrupt” message ever from the Senate, declared Walter Shaub, former head of the Government Office of Ethics.
In a Wall Street Journal column last week, Cruz warned that CEOs opposing Republican threats to voting rights will be excluded from his party’s pay-to-play legislative operation — because they’re no longer conservative enough for the GOP.
For example, Republicans will stop accepting donations in exchange for “looking the other way” when corporate bigwigs dodge taxes, Cruz wrote in a stunningly honest admission of his party’s current modus operandi.
“This time,” he wrote, “we won’t look the other way on Coca-Cola’s $12 billion in back taxes owed. This time, when Major League Baseball lobbies to preserve its multibillion-dollar antitrust exception, we’ll say no thank you. This time, when Boeing asks for billions in corporate welfare, we’ll simply let the Export-Import Bank expire.”
Shaub, who served under both Barack Obama and Donald Trump, called Cruz’s threat a blatant admission that Republicans are selling corporate donors “access to the government.” In a clear swipe at Cruz’s clueless self-exposure, Shaub noted that most lawmakers have too much “sense” to say it quite so brazenly.
“It’s the part everyone knows: these crooks sell access,” Shaub tweeted. “Others have the sense not to admit it. This is why our republic is broken: Immoral politicians selling power we’ve entrusted to them like it’s theirs to sell.”
We all knew Republicans were doing this Ted, but it's nice to have it in print now. Instead of reading "Green Eggs and Ham" on Senate time, why don't you stick it to these "woke" CEOs and get them off corporate welfare.
""the irrational pandemic response" was Rump telling us "It's going to disappear. One day it's like a miracle, it will disappear," President tRump said during a White House meeting with African-American leaders on Feb 27, 2020"
right or wrong, that comment had no practical effect
the optimism may have even helped some
and it was what his adviser, the now liberal icon, Anthony Fauci, was telling him
what was irrational was shutting down the entire economy for a disease with a low mortality rate for those below retirement age
there were many other irrational responses: the ubiquitous hand sanitizers for a disease not spread by surface contact and outdoor mask mandates, for example, and so much more...
elevating this risk above all others in society was also irrational
"and it was what his adviser, the now liberal icon, Anthony Fauci, was telling him"
Everyone knows that's not true.
You'll have to lie better next time.
This YouTube video explains what the real problem was:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hks6Nq7g6P4
"Bruce Jenner confirmed rumors he intends to run for governor of California"
Bruce Jenner is Caitlyn Jenner's dead name.
No one by the name of "Bruce Jenner" has indicated any interest in running for governor of anything.
"Bruce Jenner, the head of the transgenders in America, agrees that biological males shouldn't be allowed to compete against girls in sports contests"
So?
Do you agree with Caitlyn Jenner, a trans person, when you have stated repeatedly you believe transgender people all mentally ill?
No wonder you support Rump.
The crazier the better for you, huh?
"Trump is gone"
Yeah, look how gone he is.
Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the third-ranking House Republican, said Monday that anyone claiming the 2020 presidential election was stolen is "poisoning our democratic system," a direct response to former President Donald Trump.
"The 2020 presidential election was not stolen," Cheney, chair of the House Republican Conference, said in a tweet. "Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system."
A Cheney spokesman told NBC News that the congresswoman was responding to Trump's statement from earlier in the morning, in which he said: "The Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020 will be, from this day forth, known as THE BIG LIE!"
Liz Cheney
@Liz_Cheney
The 2020 presidential election was not stolen. Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.
Cheney has refused to back down from her criticisms of Trump, despite growing pressure from other Republicans. She was the highest-ranking Republican to vote to impeach Trump for his role in egging on the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, and has been at odds with other members of House GOP leadership over embracing Trump and entertaining his election claims since then. She has repeatedly and forcefully rejected Trump's stolen election lie.
Use of "the big lie" to describe Trump's false narrative of a stolen election — a reference to a Nazi propaganda strategy — was popularized earlier this year. Soon after a pro-Trump mob attacked the Capitol in an attempt to block Congress from affirming President Joe Biden's victory, the then-president-elect accused Trump, along with Sens. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who both led objections to certified state vote totals, of perpetuating "the big lie."
During Trump's second Senate impeachment trial, which began after the Democratic-controlled House charged him with a single count of incitement of insurrection, Democratic impeachment managers referred to "the big lie" repeatedly to describe Trump's persistent election untruths.
"The big lie" refers to an idea perpetuated by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who said if one repeats a significant lie enough, people will start to believe it.
Trump's attempted commandeering of the phrase to fit his narrative on Monday, similar to his rebranding of "fake news" in the aftermath of the 2016 election, has been echoed by some conservatives. For example, Hawley has referred to "Biden's big lie about election integrity."
Cheney's position has her at odds with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., who has tried to keep his conference aligned with the former president. After initially assigning Trump blame for the riot — though he voted hours after the attack to block the counting of some electoral votes for Biden — McCarthy has worked to get back into the former president's good graces, including visiting Trump at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.
"Everyone knows that's not true."
well, Fauci thinks it's true
of course, he claims he was just following the WHO
"Bruce Jenner is Caitlyn Jenner's dead name."
it's the name on his birth certificate
the doctors saw What it was plain to see: he was a boy
"So?"
so, even transgenders realize how unfair it is for them to compete with girls
""The big lie" refers to an idea perpetuated by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who said if one repeats a significant lie enough, people will start to believe it."
remember when Hillary ran around telling lies about why she lost in 2016?
she even paid to have the lie disseminated
paralyzed the country for a couple of years
The special election in Texas’ Sixth Congressional District on Saturday was seen as the first competitive race since Joe Biden was elected president and a bellwether on how a district that was seen to be purpling reacted to the new administration’s first 100 days.
The results were seen as a blow to Democrats because two Republicans earned enough votes to advance to a runoff. Susan Wright, the wife of the late Republican Rep. Ron Wright, was followed in votes by Jake Ellzey who eked out a win over Democrat Jana Lynne Sanchez. (Sanchez conceded in a social media post.)
John Fund, a national affairs columnist for the National Review, took to Twitter on Sunday to consider the outcome of the race and the general popularity of a president who just released his vision for the future of the country.
"If Biden Is So Popular, Why This?" Fund asked, linking to a story with the election result. "Republicans grabbed the two runoff slots in the Texas 6 special election yesterday. Dems were shut out, their candidates won a total 36% in a Dallas area seat that Trump carried by only 3 points last November."
Tammy Bruce, a Fox News contributor, tweeted out the results and posted, "Dems should prepare for a SHELLACKING in 2022."
Last month, a Fox News poll showed a 54% majority of voters approved of Biden’s job performance. That's lower than Barack Obama's 62% and George W. Bush's 63% approval at their respective 100-day points.
The district, which covers some southeastern parts of Fort Worth, as well as some rural areas, is seen as the country’s first competitive contest since Biden took office. Trump — who voiced his support of Wright — carried the district by 3 points in 2020. Four years earlier, he won by 12 points.
Trump congratulated Wright on advancing to the runoff.
"The Democrats have just conceded the race," Trump said in a statement. "Susan surged after I gave her an endorsement last week. Her wonderful husband is looking down, and is very proud of her!"
Wow, you're kidding!
Two GOPers advanced in a the red state of Texas in a district Rump won and you are calling that a bellweather?
Well, yep, GOPers win in red states.
How about that.
I thought you knew that already.
Weeks before Election Day, Bruce Bartman mailed his mother’s absentee ballot with a check mark next to President Donald Trump’s name.
The problem was, his mother had been dead since 2008.
Bartman, 70, pleaded guilty on Friday to a charge of felony perjury and unlawful voting — and blamed his decision to cast the fraudulent ballot on consuming too many false claims about the election.
“I was isolated last year in lockdown,” Bartman said, while apologizing to the judge for his crime, the Associated Press reported. “I listened to too much propaganda and made a stupid mistake.”
Samuel Stretton, Bartman’s attorney, added in court that his behavior was “a very misguided political mistake, and very stupid,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
After sentencing him to five years’ probation, leaving him unable to vote for four years, Common Pleas Court Judge George A. Pagano noted that Bartman’s crime “goes to the heart of our democracy,” according to the Inquirer, but also commended him for taking ownership of his crimes.
After Pennsylvania’s voting system flagged Bartman’s mother’s registration as having come from a dead person, Bartman fraudulently signed a letter claiming that she was alive.
On Friday, the district attorney said he agreed with the judge’s decision not to send Bartman to prison.
“There’s not public benefit to him being incarcerated,” Stollsteimer said. “This defendant from the beginning has accepted responsibility for his actions, and he has paid the price for them.”
In addition to Bartman, two other men in Pennsylvania face charges of fraudulently voting for Trump, according to the Inquirer. Ralph Thurman of Chester County allegedly tried to cast his son’s vote and Richard Lynn of Luzerne County allegedly attempted to obtain an absentee ballot for his deceased mother. Both cases are pending.
House Democrats are beginning to confront the challenging reality awaiting them in the 2022 midterm elections amid a spate of retirements and dim redistricting prospects.
Democrats had hoped that brightening economic and public health outlooks combined with ongoing discord within the GOP would save them from the kind of electoral thrashing that historically besets the president’s party in midterm elections.
But privately, some in the party are beginning to acknowledge the uphill battle they will face next year when their narrow majorities in the House and Senate will be on the line.
“I think it’s starting to set in a little bit,” one Democratic consultant and former House staffer said. The consultant noted there was “a lot of optimism” among Democrats earlier this year after they captured the Senate majority and President Biden was sworn in to the White House.
“There are things to be optimistic about and it’s not like the Republicans have it all figured out either,” the consultant added. “I just think we need to be realistic about things, that history isn’t really on our side.”
The challenges for Democrats have come into clearer focus in recent days.
Rep. Cheri Bustos (D), who narrowly won reelection last year in a western Illinois district that former President Trump carried in both 2016 and 2020, said on Friday that she will leave Congress after her current term. She joins two other House Democrats, Reps. Ann Kirkpatrick (Ariz.) and Filemon Vela (Texas), in announcing retirement plans.
With Bustos out, six Democratic incumbents are set to go up for reelection next year in districts that Trump carried in 2020.
There are likely more Democratic retirements to come. Rep. Charlie Crist (D-Fla.) is expected to announce plans on Tuesday to run for Florida governor, potentially leaving open a Pinellas County swing district that Republicans had held for decades before Crist was elected in 2016.
Two other Florida Democrats, Reps. Stephanie Murphy and Val Demings, are seen as potential contenders for statewide office. In Ohio, Rep. Tim Ryan (D) is foregoing reelection to his closely contested House seat to run to replace retiring Sen. Rob Portman (R).
The party was also dealt a setback over the weekend in the race to replace the late Rep. Ron Wright (R-Texas) when Democrat Jana Lynne Sanchez fell just a fraction of a percentage point short of qualifying for a runoff election, ensuring that a Republican will succeed Wright.
Democrats saw their majority in the House shrink to one of the smallest margins in decades after a worse-than-expected performance in 2020. Twelve of their members were defeated by Republicans, while every GOP incumbent held their seat.
“We were all expecting to gain seats last year too, and that’s when we were playing offense,” one Democratic strategist who worked on key races in 2020 said. “We’re on the other side of things now, so yeah, there are some reasons to be wary about next year.”
Donald Trump’s two Scottish golf resorts collected up to $800,000 in subsidies from the British government to protect jobs during COVID-19 but fired “scores” of workers, a top union complained Sunday.
Union officials called the money grab a “scandal” and are calling for a government investigation.
Trump’s SLC Turnberry Ltd received as much as $700,000 in taxpayer funds, while his resort in Balmedie, Aberdeenshire, was paid up to $100,000 in just two months, according to government documents, reported the Scottish Sun. (The amounts are reported in ranges.)
Some other golf resorts collected as much or even more. But the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers complained to The Scotsman that the Trump Organization “hoovering up” public money while cutting staff made a “mockery” of a program specifically designed to save jobs.
The union said some 66 workers were let go at Turnberry in Ayrshire since last spring. Some have been hired back but at reduced pay, according to the union.
“It is clear to us that at the very least the principles of the job retention scheme appear to have been breached by the Trump Organization, and that should now be subjected to a detailed and forensic investigation” by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs department, said the RMT’s General Secretary Mick Cash. “It’s a scandal.”
When Trump wooed both Ireland and Scotland to allow him to develop golf resorts in both countries, he promised the operations would deliver major tax revenue. In fact, it appears the Trump Organization hasn’t paid a penny in taxes at any of the resorts because of constantly reported losses.
(What, the business operations of a so-called billionaire aren't paying any taxes? Say it ain't so!)
In 2017, Turnberry was granted a $147,000 tax break. The resort was later cut out of the program that was intended to give struggling companies a break, the Sunday Herald reported.
“It’s bad enough that he has a business presence in Scotland,” Patrick Harvie, a member of the Scottish Parliament from the Green Party, told the newspaper after the decision was made. “It’s galling to learn that the public purse is giving him a helping hand.”
"Union officials called the money grab a “scandal” and are calling for a government investigation."
unions are always good for a laugh
Trump broke no laws
if the United Kingdom can't design their laws properly, it's not the obligation of private citizens to do their work for them
replace the legislators
Fox News staffers called on the network to fire Tucker Carlson over his call to harass parents and children for wearing masks, but the highly rated host is "invincible."
Current and former employees were embarrassed and outraged when Carlson urged viewers to call child protection services on parents whose children wear masks in public, but they told The Daily Beast the top-rated prime-time host is "untouchable" and will never "suffer any repercussions" for his openly white nationalist comments or other statements that might lead to violence.
"He's a good example of how much you can get away with at Fox if your ratings are high," one current network staffer said. "Aside from that, he just perpetuates the right's catastrophe platform. They cannot win with their supposed limited government, fiscal conservatism, because not even they really believe in it. So all they do is fear monger."
The Anti-Defamation League had called on Carlson to be fired and advertisers to boycott his show after he endorsed the white-supremacist "Great Replacement" theory on air, but Fox Corp CEO Lachlan Murdoch defended the network's biggest star -- much to the chagrin of staffers.
"The Murdochs love him," one former Fox News personality said. "Like them, he is a rich, prep school kid born with a silver spoon who traffics in populism while living in an expensive ivory tower and never meeting in real life the people he gins up for ratings."
Even advertiser boycotts won't dent the Murdochs' support for Carlson, because Fox doesn't need them thanks to their loyal viewers -- and other cable customers -- who pay carriers to make sure the conservative network remains on their service.
"He's the new Bill O'Reilly," another ex-Fox News employee stated. "The dirty little secret is that FNC doesn't care about losing advertisers. They make their money via cable conglomerates that pay them much money so that dumb f*cks who worship FNC can continue being told what, in their heart of hearts, they want to believe -- and that's a lot of people."
Fox News staffers are frustrated their concerns aren't taken seriously, and one current staffer says his ability to skate away from consequences remind them of someone else Fox News helped turn into a political star.
"If Tucker left, his fans would follow him wherever he went and would turn Fox off for scorning their leader," the current staffer said. "If Trump is the most dangerous person in the country, Tucker is a close second behind him."
"Fox News staffers called on the network to fire Tucker Carlson over his call to harass parents and children for wearing masks, but the highly rated host is "invincible.""
maybe the staffers should be fired and go work someplace they agree with, like the propaganda dished out at CNN or MSNBC
btw, TC is right
kids shouldn't be forced masks to protect themselves against a disease that is a low risk for their age group
wearing masks has its own risks
"Current and former employees were embarrassed and outraged when Carlson urged viewers to call child protection services on parents whose children wear masks in public,"
it was a rhetorical device
everyone knows child protection services wouldn't do anything
"they told The Daily Beast the top-rated prime-time host is "untouchable" and will never "suffer any repercussions" for his openly white nationalist comments or other statements that might lead to violence."
if we ban any statements that "might lead to violence", Maxine Waters would be dancing with the stars
"They cannot win with their supposed limited government, fiscal conservatism, because not even they really believe in it."
you're in for a big surprise in November 2022
Americans elected Biden because of Trump's excesses, not because they've changed ideologically
that's why Dems hold Congress by such a slim margin and why Biden's approval ratings are below all other recent Presidents except for Trump
"much to the chagrin of staffers"
most organizations would fire staffers that try to embarrass the organizations
sounds like FOX is remarkably tolerant
"Like them, he is a rich, prep school kid born with a silver spoon who traffics in populism while living in an expensive ivory tower and never meeting in real life the people he gins up for ratings."
TTF motto: when logic fails, there is always resentment to go to
"Even advertiser boycotts won't dent the Murdochs' support for Carlson, because Fox doesn't need them thanks to their loyal viewers -- and other cable customers -- who pay carriers to make sure the conservative network remains on their service."
oh dear
that's terribly inconvenient for liberals whose idea of arguing their case is to put anyone who disagrees with them out of business
of course, those boycotts often backfire
remember how Chik-Fil-A sales soared when lunatic fringe homosexual advocates tried to boycott them because their owner donated money to pro-family groups
The editorial board for the conservative Wall Street Journal took aim at the GOP Tuesday for its infighting over the 2020 election and criticized the party’s effort to oust Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) for “daring to tell the truth” about it.
Republicans have been trying to remove Cheney, the third-ranking Republican in the House, from her leadership position because she refutes former President Donald Trump’s lie that the election was rigged. She was one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for inciting the violent Jan. 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol.
Her refusal to get in line has rankled Trump and other Republicans. On Wednesday, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) was caught on a hot mic complaining that “I’ve had it with her” and saying that “someone just has to bring a motion, but I assume that will probably take place.”
“But Mr. McCarthy knows Ms. Cheney is right,” the Journal’s editorial said. “The election wasn’t stolen, yet Mr. Trump wants an endorsement of his stolen claim to be a litmus test for every Republican candidate.”
“She may be ousted because she is daring to tell the truth to GOP voters,” the editorial added, “and at personal political risk.”
The Journal’s editorial board said that purging Cheney for her honesty would diminish the party and called on Republicans to find a way to speak the truth to voters in the 2022 midterm elections.
“Republicans will look foolish, or worse, to swing voters if they refight 2020 in 2022,” it said.
From the WSJ:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/purging-liz-cheney-11620168273
This should be a hopeful moment for House Republicans. While they’re playing defense in the minority for now, their prospects for picking up the five net seats they need to regain the majority in 2022 are excellent. That is, unless they devolve into internal brawling over the 2020 election.
Yet that’s precisely what they seem to be doing as some Members try to oust Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney from the GOP House leadership. Ms. Cheney easily survived an earlier effort to dump her, 145-61, after she was one of 10 House Republicans to vote to impeach Donald Trump after the events of Jan. 6.
But she continues to rankle some in the GOP House conference by refusing to go along with Mr. Trump’s demand that Republicans agree that the 2020 election was stolen. On Monday Mr. Trump issued a statement that “The Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020 will be, from this day forth, known as THE BIG LIE!”
Ms. Cheney responded on Twitter : “The 2020 presidential election was not stolen. Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.”
This has angered some in the House GOP, and on Tuesday Axios caught House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy on a hot mic saying “I’ve had it with her.” But Mr. McCarthy knows Ms. Cheney is right. The election wasn't stolen, yet Mr. Trump wants an endorsement of his stolen claim to be a litmus test for every Republican candidate. He’s the one who wants to refight his losing campaign...
With 18 months left before the midterms, a spate of Democratic departures from the House is threatening to erode the party’s slim majority in the House and imperil President Joe Biden’s far-reaching policy agenda.
In the past two months, five House Democrats from competitive districts have announced they won’t seek reelection next year. They include Rep. Charlie Crist of Florida, who on Tuesday kicked off a campaign for governor, and Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio, who will run for the Senate seat being vacated by Rob Portman.
Three other Democrats will leave seats vacant in districts likely to see significant change once they are redrawn using the data from the 2020 census, and several more are weighing bids for higher office.
An early trickle of retirements by House members in competitive districts is often the first sign of a coming political wave. In the 2018 cycle, 48 House Republicans didn’t seek reelection — and Democrats won 14 of those vacancies. Now Republicans are salivating over the prospect of reversing that dynamic and erasing the Democrats’ six-seat advantage.
“The two biggest headaches of any cycle are redistricting and retirements, and when you have both in one cycle it’s a migraine,” said former Rep. Steve Israel of New York, who led the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2012 and 2014.
Democrats face other vexing challenges as well: Republican legislators control redistricting in key states where they can draw boundaries in their favor. Redistricting alone — with Republicans controlling mapmaking in three times as many districts as Democrats — could provide Republicans the seats they need to control the House. And historic political trends almost always work against the president’s party in midterm elections.
The prospect of losing the House majority adds a greater level of urgency for the Biden administration and congressional Democrats eager to push through expansive policy proposals. It also raises questions about the staying power of Democrats, after an election in which they barely ousted an unpopular president while suffering a surprising number of down-ballot losses in races they expected to win.
You call this gone??
The Memo: The GOP's war is already over — Trump won
The war for the Republican Party’s soul lasted about as long as a season of “The Apprentice.” Former President Trump won.
Thursday marks four months to the day since the Jan 6. insurrection Trump incited, for which he was impeached.
At the time, top GOP figures including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) spoke out against Trump. McConnell at one point hinted at the possibility of a significant GOP vote to remove the then-president, in the apparent hope of ridding the party of the insurrection’s stain.
It’s all changed now.
Trump’s most aggressive GOP critic, Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), looks likely to be ousted from her House leadership position within days. McConnell, who spoke out in Cheney’s defense during a February push against her, has conspicuously declined to do so this time.
Cheney is not retreating from her view that basic democratic values require a repudiation of Trump, his role in the riot and his ongoing false allegations of election fraud.
Speaking to donors earlier this week, she called Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen “a poison in the bloodstream of our democracy.”
But the writing is on the wall for Cheney, and she appears to know it. Politico reported Wednesday that she is not bothering to canvass members in the hope of holding onto her leadership role.
Her likely challenger — and likely replacement — is Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), a Trump loyalist. The former president endorsed her in a statement Wednesday, calling her “a far superior choice” to Cheney, whom he labeled “a warmongering fool who has no business in Republican Party leadership.”
A Texas Republican congressional candidate who lost a U.S. House runoff earlier this week after campaigning as a “Never Trumper” and getting only 3% of the vote, is now condemning the party’s current focus ― or lack thereof.
Michael Wood ran in Texas’s 6th Congressional District for the seat previously occupied by Republican Rep. Ron Wright with a campaign critical of Donald Trump, even though he voted for the now former president.
In the process, he attracted only 3% of the vote and lost to Wright’s widow, Susan Wright, who was endorsed by the former president. Wright died in February after contracting the coronavirus.
On Wednesday, Wood told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace that the Republican Party has “lost its way” and has no real ideas or policies other than, of course, owning those gosh-darned libs.
“I think that we are just a party of grievance right now,” Wood said. “I don’t know what we stand for. We stand for owning the libs. We don’t like baseball. We don’t like Coke. We don’t like NASCAR. We don’t like Hollywood. We don’t like academia. We don’t like anything. We’re just a grievance party that hates a good hunk of America and then we call ourselves patriots, and this is just a dead end.”
Although some Republicans might find “lib owning” to be a bizarre form of self-care, Wood warned that’s not a longterm political philosophy.
------------
Oh come on Michael, you're not giving Republicans enough credit! They are not JUST a grievance party - you're forgetting about all the conspiracy theories, misogyny, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and transphobia!
Give them some credit where it's due man! It takes a lot of EFFORT to maintain the level of blustering buffoonery for years on end!
"Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), looks likely to be ousted from her House leadership position within days.
Cheney is not retreating from her view that basic democratic values require a repudiation of Trump, his role in the riot and his ongoing false allegations of election fraud."
Cheney is not being replaced because of her view that Trump's theory about the election is wrong
she's being replaced because she won't stop obsessing on it
Biden is trying to turn America into a socialist regime and needs to be resisted
"Maybe if they take some hydroxychloroquine and wash their eyes out with bleach"
look at the TTFer spreading lies, what a surprise!
"A Texas Republican congressional candidate who lost a U.S. House runoff earlier this week after campaigning as a “Never Trumper” and getting only 3% of the vote, is now condemning the party’s current focus ― or lack thereof."
he lost and complains - what an amazing story!
thanks for sharing!
"she's being replaced because she won't stop obsessing on it"
No, she's being replaced because she won't go along with the rest of the Republicans and their Orwellian re-write of election history.
"look at the TTFer spreading lies, what a surprise!"
You don't know the meaning of the word "sarcasm."
What a surprise!
The View’s Meghan McCain on Wednesday went off on the Republican Party for pushing Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) out of a leadership position over her anti-Trump stance, calling the GOP a “sausagefest of MAGA” that has rallied around a “Cheeto Jesus.”
As one of only 10 Republican House members to vote to impeach Donald Trump for inciting January’s Capitol insurrection, Cheney has been completely marginalized within the GOP. And after she initially survived one attempt to oust her from her leadership role, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) abandoned her this week, telling a Fox News host he “lost confidence” in Cheney all while moving to replace her with pro-Trump Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York.
The View’s resident conservative host didn’t buy that McCarthy was “caught on a hot mic” when he told a Fox News host off-air on Tuesday that Cheney has “real problems” and that he’s “had it with her.”
“That was done intentionally,” McCain declared, adding, “What’s happening is, it’s clear—I’ll be a little crass—they’re shivving her for her going on television multiple times and saying the election wasn’t stolen, and refusing to debase herself to Cheeto Jesus!”
The message being sent by Republicans, McCain continued, is that “women like me and Liz Cheney,” who “refuse to bend the knee” to Trump, have no place in the party any longer.
“We’re worthless! We’re not worth fighting for to keep. It’s Kafkaesque to spin this any other way,” she fumed.
The GOP is going to continue to lose college-educated women like herself, the conservative pundit declared, jeopardizing the party in future elections.
“Go ahead in this sausagefest of MAGA up on Capitol Hill,” McCain raged. “Pull her out and put another woman in who will do anything you want for President Trump. The election wasn’t stolen. He’s Jesus. It’s only Trumpism. See where this lands us in midterms. I’m absolutely furious!”
The other woman McCain referenced was Rep. Stefanik, a steadfast Trump supporter who was one of the Republicans to vote against certifying Biden’s electoral victory after the Capitol riots.
Shortly before The View hit the air on Wednesday, Punchbowl reported that both McCarthy and Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), the top two Republicans in the House, cleared the field to remove Cheney over her criticism of Trump’s continued lies about his election loss.
Kansas state Rep. Mark Samsel was arrested on charges of alleged misdemeanor battery on Thursday after getting into a physical altercation with a student while substitute teaching in Wellsville.
Samsel, 36, was booked into the Franklin County Adult Detention Center after 3:30 p.m. Thursday. He has since been released on $1,000 bond, Sheriff Jeff Richards said.
Superintendent Ryan Bradbury said that Samsel will no longer be allowed to work for the district.
On Wednesday, Samsel, R-Wellsville, was substitute teaching at the Wellsville school district’s secondary school. Throughout the day, high school students began recording videos of the lawmaker talking about suicide, sex, masturbation, God and the Bible.
In one video shared with The Star, Samsel tells students about “a sophomore who’s tried killing himself three times,” adding that it was because “he has two parents and they’re both females.”
“He’s a foster kid. His alternatives in life were having no parents or foster care parents who are gay,” Samsel tells students. “How do you think I’m going to feel if he commits suicide? Awful.”
In another video, Samsel is recorded telling students, “make babies. Who likes making babies? That feels good, doesn’t it? Procreate ... You haven’t masturbated? Don’t answer that question. ... God already knows.”
Videos shared with The Star — by parents of students in the class — show Samsel focusing most of his attention on one male student. Both Samsel and the student paced around the classroom, talking back and forth. Samsel is shown following the student around and grabbing him. In one video, he puts his arms around the student and says that he was being hard on him.
At one point, Samsel tells the student, “You’re about ready to anger me and get the wrath of God. Do you believe me when I tell you that God has been speaking to me?” He then pushes him, and the student runs to the other side of the classroom.
“You should run and scream.”
n another video, he tells students, “Class, you have permission to kick him in the balls.”
Parents told The Star that Samsel “put hands on the student” and allegedly kneed him in the crotch. In a video apparently taken immediately after the incident, the student is shown on the ground. Samsel is standing over him and says, “did it hurt?”
He then asks him why he is about to start crying, pats him on the shoulder and apologizes, and then says he can “go to the nurse, she can check it for you.”
Samsel addresses another student and says, “do you want to check his nuts for him, please?”
The videos angered dozens of parents, who felt that their children were put in danger. Samsel works with students in several capacities, including as a referee and through church groups, parents said.
“I’m a concerned parent who doesn’t want this swept under the rug,” said father Joshua Zeck. “He’s around kids all the time. He’s a state representative. He’s in a position of power.”
“What’s happening is, it’s very clear, and I’m gonna be a little crass, they’re shivving her [Liz Cheney] for her going on television multiple times and saying that the election wasn’t stolen and for refusing to debase herself to Cheeto Jesus.”
"Her bid for the White House was engulfed by a tidal wave of fabricated news and false conspiracy theories. Now Hillary Clinton is calling for a “global reckoning” with disinformation that includes reining in the power of big tech.
The former secretary of state and first lady warns that the breakdown of a shared truth, and the divisiveness that surely follows, poses a danger to democracy at a moment when China is selling the conceit that autocracy works."
The Queen of Hypocrisy strikes again.
This is the woman who paid foreign agents to make up lies that the Trump campaign colluded with Russians to defeat her in 2016. This diverted the attention of our elected officials for over two years. Her activities amounted to defrauding the US government.
More right wing lies about Gramma Clinton, who won the popular vote by millions of votes in 2016.
And then came Rump who fomented insurrection against Congress for doing their jobs to certify Biden's election and who still lies to this day about 2020 voter fraud which as been disproven over and over again by every court in the nation.
Now you claim Rump is "gone" and yet it's clear to everyone Rump remains the GOP's leader and all GOPers now bow to his despicable lying will.
Gone? What are stupid or a liar?
Hillary Clinton did, in fact, do just what I said
the wife of the guy who uttered the phrase that out him in the Liars' Hall of Fame, "it depends what your definition of is is", is probably one of the most deceitful public figures of the 21st century
btw, just the other day you guys were giving credit for a booming economy to Joe "Bidin' my time"
today's jobs' reports were far below projections so you need to figure how to blame Trump
life sure does present Dems with sick choices on a regular basis!
"'Hillary Clinton did, in fact, do just what I said"
Let's see your proof, perhaps her indictment and arrest for the supposed crimes you keep stupidly lying about.
A Capitol defendant who bought into former President Donald Trump’s lies about a stolen election came down with “Foxitus” and “Foxmania” after watching too much Fox News, his attorney told a court on Thursday.
Anthony Antonio’s attorney told a D.C. magistrate judge that after Antonio was laid off because of the coronavirus pandemic last year, he spent all his time living in a home with four other individuals who watched a lot of Fox News.
“For the next approximate six months, Fox television played constantly,” lawyer Joseph Hurley said. “He became hooked with what I call ‘Foxitus’ or ‘Foxmania’ and became interested in the political aspect and started believing what was being fed to him.”
Another Capitol defendant on the Zoom hearing, Landon Copeland, soon interrupted Hurley and objected to him disparaging the former president. (Copeland continued interrupting the proceeding over the next several hours, and the judge eventually ordered a competency hearing).
Hurley, whom the Wilmington, Delaware-based News Journal described as an attorney “known for his bravado and courtroom theatrics,” said that Antonio believed he was following Trump’s orders to march on Washington and that he was taking part in what he saw as a patriotic movement to serve the United States.
The lawyer also told the judge he’s in no huge rush to move forward with the case because he wanted prosecutors to take care of “bad” Capitol defendants before his client’s case was resolved.
Antonio surrendered to police in Delaware last month. He was charged with five federal crimes linked to his presence at the Jan. 6 riot: knowingly entering or remaining on restricted grounds without lawful authority, violent entry and disorderly conduct, impeding law enforcement during civil disorder, disrupting Congress and damaging government property.
In several videos, he was seen among the mob at the Lower West Terrace Entrance of the Capitol building, which “saw a tremendous amount of violent criminal activity” that day, according to an FBI affidavit.
In one video captured on a police body-worn camera, Antonio shouted at officers, “You want war? We got war. 1776 all over again.”
He wore a black tactical bulletproof vest adorned with a far-right “Three Percenter” patch, a camouflage shirt, and had a tattoo of the words “Carpe Diem” on his right wrist, the affidavit said.
Antonio is accused of climbing the scaffolding outside the Capitol, entering the building through a broken window, obtaining a riot shield and gas mask, threatening police and squirting water at Michael Fanone, the police officer who was dragged down a set of stairs by rioters and repeatedly tased and beaten.
Multiple men have been arrested in connection with that assault, including Thomas Sibick, Kyle Young, Albuquerque C. Head and Daniel Rodriguez, who was identified and charged as the rioter who electroshocked Fanone.
Fox News and the Trump administration had a symbiotic relationship for much of Donald Trump’s presidency, though this grew more dangerous and intense in the lead-up to and aftermath of the 2020 election. The network amplified Trump’s fiction about a rigged election and vice-versa. Trump’s allies were allowed to broadcast their baseless claims largely unchecked during repeated appearances on-air to Fox’s millions of viewers. And even after hundreds of pro-Trump rioters, inspired by the lie, laid siege to the Capitol, some hosts at the network downplayed what happened, spread conspiracy theories about it, and defended the insurrectionists.
Fanone said in an interview last month that it’s been difficult hearing politicians whitewash the “brutal, savage, hand-to-hand combat” he lived through, specifically quoting from an interview Trump gave on Fox News in March in which the former president claimed rioters posed “zero threat” and were “hugging and kissing” police.
"Let's see your proof, perhaps her indictment and arrest for the supposed crimes you keep stupidly lying about."
lying is generally not a crime
but, tell me, specifically what you want proof of
Try providing proof that "Hillary Clinton did, in fact, do just what [you] said."
If you don't know "just what you said" she did, that's your problem, not mine.
It requires scrolling back (HINT: right here in this thread), which appears to be against your religion or something.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) earned kudos from truth-tellers in March when she released a report simply documenting the social media posts of Republicans “who voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election.” She compiled their words, revealing a hodgepodge of conspiracy-mongering and lying about the 2020 election. This was too much for the snowflake Republicans.
They have now filed a complaint, a copy of which I have obtained, with the Communication Standards Commission, an obscure body in the House formerly known as the Mailing Standards Commission, as it historically dealt primarily with franking issues.
The complaint, filed by Rep. Earl L. “Buddy” Carter (R-Ga.), whines: “At its core, the so-called report repeatedly violates the Commission’s rules of decorum and civility by personalizing and politicizing attacks on more than 100 Members of Congress for public statements they made on social media.” Actually, it simply recorded Republicans’ own words, thereby embarrassing them. He claims the report “engages in speculation as to the motivation or intent of the Members,” but it does no such thing. The giveaway is that Carter claims Lofgren only “insinuates” members “aided and abetted the insurrection or incited the attack” on Jan. 6.
Carter, of course, did not come up with this on his own. The Republican ranking member on the Committee on House Administration, Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.), solicited such complaints. As his staff wrote in a “Dear Colleagues” letter that apparently was inadvertently released publicly: “If any Member feels strongly that they want to take action against the report and wants to know more about the process for filing a complaint with the Communications Standards Commission please reach out to … schedule a time for a call with our team.”
Lofgren is having none of this. In her response to the complaint, which I also obtained, she declares, “The Review does not violate the House of Representatives’ Communications Standards Manual, which provides that Members may use official communications resources to conduct official business that relates directly or indirectly to congressional functions and Federal issues of public concern. To the contrary, this Review is critical to our obligations to the Constitution and our understanding of the House’s responsibilities under the 14th Amendment.” (She refers to Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which prevents those who have engaged in insurgency from holding office, absent a waiver from Congress.)
She reminds her colleagues that the disgraced former president was impeached for “Incitement of Insurrection.” Therefore, the participation of any members in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election is a “fact-based question.” She explains:
"In order to make a determination regarding the application of the 14th Amendment to sitting House Members, it would be necessary to examine the actions and rhetoric of those Members. Accordingly, I asked my staff to take a quick look at the social media postings of Members who had objected to the counting of Electoral College votes in the same time frame that the former President’s statements had been examined. It is, of course, a judgment call for each Member to make whether any given statements or the accumulation of those statements amounts to incitement of insurrection."
The nub of the problem for Republicans, as Lofgren points out, is that her report “is a mirror that lists Members’ own words. If there are screenshots of and/or links to communications that are ‘disparaging,’ including ‘personal insults, ad hominem attacks or attacks on a person’s character,’ those communications were made by the Members of Congress listed, not by me, and the Complainant could properly address his concerns to those Members.”
She then quotes at length Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who condemned the Former Guy after his acquittal and made clear that there “is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day. The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their President. And their having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories, and reckless hyperbole which the defeated President kept shouting into the largest megaphone.” It was McConnell who declared the problem was not merely the former president’s words but “the entire manufactured atmosphere of looming catastrophe; the increasingly wild myths about a reverse landslide election that was being stolen in some secret coup by our now-President.”
In other words, Jan. 6 was about the Big Lie that the election was stolen, which many House Republicans helped spread and which they now insist Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) must countenance, if not embrace. Lofgren concludes: “There has been much discussion about so-called 'cancel culture' of late, but I can only note that Congressman Carter’s efforts to silence me could never succeed in cancelling the dangerous, violent insurrectionist misconduct the nation saw on display January 6th.”
Republicans’ political stupidity is hard to fathom. They chose to attack a strong, informed woman (arguably the most knowledgeable on the subject of impeachment and a master of House rules) for airing their own rhetoric. Did they really think they were going to silence Zoe Lofgren, of all people?
It’s hard to think of a better way for Republicans to remind Americans of their own wholly irresponsible conduct. (The complaint will go nowhere since the commission is split 3-to-3.) What’s more, the timing is priceless. This comes the same week the GOP is attempting to banish Cheney from leadership for the “crime” of honesty, for refusing to sweep Jan. 6 under the rug and for refusal to kneel (as they have) before the MAGA cult leader. They simply cannot abide truth-telling women.
"If you don't know "just what you said" she did, that's your problem, not mine."
I do know what I said. The only reason I asked you to specify is that you seemed to be reading in something else. Just let me know what you want proof of, loser.
REID: It's hard for me to imagine what that even looks like, Michael, but can you discern as a Republican, what is it that they would want to do if they got power? Because all they seem to want to do right now is fall on their knees and worship Donald Trump. So let's say they get power. What is it that they want to do? What are they going to do to us?
STEELE: White it up as much as possible. You know, most people say light it up. No, they just white it up as much as possible.
REID: Basically hold power essentially just lock people of color out of being able to vote.
STEELE: I think you got a sense and a glimpse of it during the four years of Donald Trump of what an extended, unchecked, unfetterred power base would look like in this iteration of the party. You, the three of us, persona definitely non grata. Look, all I'd have to say is just on a quick tip on that, Tucker, if you're going to go for the queen bee, baby, you better make it count.
REID: Don't bring Tuckums up. Leave Tuckums alone.
STEELE: No, it's an absolute power grab right now. Here's why you know that. What are the governing ideas they put out? What's your policy prescription for --
REID: Voter suppression.
STEELE: For infrastructure, for health care, for the economy? Okay, you cut taxes, but, you know, what do you do about those people who didn't get the full benefit of that? So there are a lot of pieces here that go to governing that the party has given up on. What did Mitch McConnell just say? What did he just say? Our goal is to stop everything Donald -- I mean Joe Biden is doing. We figured that out. Can you put something on the table that you want to do?
An Arizona state senator who initially backed the controversial recount of November votes in Maricopa County now says he regrets his support of the “ridiculous” operation.
“It makes us look like idiots,” state Sen. Paul Boyer of suburban Phoenix told The New York Times in an article published Sunday. “I didn’t think it would be this ridiculous. It’s embarrassing to be a state senator at this point.”
Boyer has joined a growing army of Arizonans appalled by the Republican-dominated state Senate’s recount operation that targets only races won by Democrats in the county that includes Phoenix. The private company hired by the Senate, Cyber Ninjas, has no experience with ballots or elections, and is owned and operated by right-wing conspiracy theorist Doug Logan, who subscribes to the “big lie” that the presidential election was rigged against former Republican President Donald Trump.
Critics of the audit fear that ballots may have already been altered, lost, stolen or trashed in the unsupervised partisan operation.
“I have no confidence as an election official that any of those ballots are legitimate now. None,” said Washington Secretary of State Kim Wyman, a Republican, who said he has been deeply disturbed by the operation.
She told The Arizona Republic in an article Sunday that the Cyber Ninjas’ procedures don’t come close to the standards of election administrators. “Pretty much anything from today forward is just a crapshoot, and the only point of it is to undermine confidence in the results. That is the only endgame here,” she added.
Last week, Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, received death threats when she charged that the audit was being conducted with uncertified equipment and ballot auditing procedures that are “a significant departure from standard best practices.”
So far, the Cyber Ninjas firm has managed to recount only about 250,000 of the 2.1 million votes cast in the 2020 election in Maricopa County and will likely still be tallying at least until August. Journalists have reported an apparently haphazard audit process. A reporter for The Arizona Republic witnessed auditors using pens with black and blue ink, which are supposed to be forbidden in any recount because they can be used to alter ballots.
Cyber Ninjas workers have also been using ultraviolet light to examine ballots in an effort to detect traces of bamboo that organizers are convinced would reveal interference by China.
To add more chaos to the situation, the ballots will soon have to be packed up and stored in an unsupervised operation to make way for graduation ceremonies at Phoenix’s Veterans Memorial Coliseum, where the recount is taking place.
Now the state Senate and Cyber Ninjas are seeking access to county government routers and passwords as part of the audit. It’s a strategy Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone has called “mindlessly reckless” because it would threaten the security of sensitive law enforcement work. It would also risk exposing private citizens’ data to a private company with a partisan agenda.
Last week, the Senate agreed to “defer” its canvassing of voters by Cyber Ninjas operatives who were knocking on doors and interrogating residents about their voting histories. The operation was at least temporarily halted after the U.S. Department of Justice warned that such activity could illegally intimidate voters and violate civil rights.
The Arizona vote was certified nearly six months ago by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey after several recounts failed to find any irregularities. Democrat Joe Biden beat Trump by 10,457 votes in the state. Biden edged out his rival by more than 2 percentage points ― about 45,000 votes ― in Maricopa County.
Trump recently indicated to guests at his Mar-a-Lago social club in Florida that sudden votes unearthed for him by the Cyber Ninjas could be his way back to White House reinstatement.
"Trump recently indicated to guests at his Mar-a-Lago social club in Florida that sudden votes unearthed for him by the Cyber Ninjas could be his way back to White House reinstatement."
Well maybe it'll work better than the armed insurrection he helped instigate on Jan. 6, 2021 did for him.
Feel free to reread Rump's January 6, 2021 transcript:
https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2021-01-13/transcript-of-trumps-speech-at-rally-before-us-capitol-riot
Former Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele agreed Monday with MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace that the GOP has morphed into “one of the largest anti-Democratic movements in the world.”
Wallace and Steele were discussing Republican leaders’ repeated attacks on the presidential election and on party dissenters like Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) who support the choice of American voters and justice against Capitol rioters. You can watch their exchange at 1:20 in the clip above.
Wallace, who served as White House communications director to former President George W. Bush, played a clip of Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) hedging about the legitimacy of the presidential election results in an interview with Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.”
Wallace then turned to Steele: “Part of me wants to ask you if the Republicans now represent one of the largest, in terms of numbers, anti-democratic movements in the world.”
Steele fired back: “There’s no doubt about that. We’re streaming headlong into that truth about who Republicans are and how they see themselves right now.”
Republicans’ continued efforts to undermine American voters’ choice for the presidency is one of their key assaults on democracy, he said.
“How do you get [to] the rest of the country that’s sitting there, going, ‘Oh no, no, no, Joe Biden didn’t win, because Donald Trump told us so?’” Steele added. “As long as that narrative persists, we’re going to have ... a very difficult time holding that line on democracy because you’re going to have those folks ... buying into this idea that what they’re seeing happen didn’t happen.”
Wallace asked: “How do you make democracy something that the right cares about again?”
Steele responded: “One is what do good citizens out there decide to do. How do they stand up and respond?”
“The other part of that is the ballot box,” he said, later adding: “That’s where you have to overwhelm the system with your legitimate votes. At the end of the day, the numbers don’t lie. You can’t outrun 8 million more votes than the other guy.”
He added, “You can’t let up and you can’t sit down.”
In Arizona, supporters of the defeated Trump are examining ballots with UV light to see “if there’s bamboo in the paper” in support of a conspiracy theory that 40,000 fake ballots were surreptitiously flown in from Asia.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had a Fox News-only signing ceremony for a state law that will disproportionately stop non-White people from voting.
Republican legislators in Tennessee and Colorado have offered defenses of the three-fifths compromise.
House Republicans attempted to form a caucus in support of “Anglo-Saxon” traditions.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) got ensnarled in a sex-for-cash probe that involves an underage girl.
Rudy Giuliani had his home and office raided by federal agents.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) announced that “100 percent of my focus is on standing up to this [Biden] administration.”
And at the bottom of the barrel is McCarthy, now publicly backing Cheney’s ouster, which is likely to come to a vote Wednesday. Last week, in hot-mic remarks, McCarthy said: “I’ve had it with her. You know, I’ve lost confidence.” Instead, he’s backing a challenge by Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.), who is far less conservative than Cheney but has the essential credential of supporting Trump’s “big lie” about the election — including the bamboo boondoggle in Arizona.
McCarthy has made an ends-justify-the-means calculation to “accept the lie at the moment so we can win the majority and then address it.” Only about 10 House Republicans are dumb enough to genuinely believe that Trump won the election. The rest simply fear primary challenges and therefore accept McCarthy’s belief that “winning a majority was more important than a clear-eyed recognition of what happened on January 6.”
When they jettison Liz Cheney on Wednesday, the Republican Party will send a message to whatever sane conservatives remain inside its circus tent: You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.
There’s a routine where Trumpists, most recently Matt Gaetz, go on about how, “They aren’t really coming for me. They’re coming for you. I’m just in the way.” That’s not true (they’re after Gaetz, for instance, for allegedly paying for sex with teenagers) but it is another classic case of victimhood and projection.
No matter what nonsense House Minority Leader and craven Trump toady Kevin McCarthy says about how “we are a big tent party” that “embrace(s) free thought and debate,” ousting Cheney from her role in Republican leadership isn’t just about Cheney. It’s about rooting out millions of center-right Americans who just aren’t crazy enough to be members of today’s Republican Party,
House Republicans ousted Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) from her leadership post Wednesday because she continues to challenge former president Donald Trump over his false claims about election fraud and his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The voice vote to remove her as chair of the House Republican Conference underscored that the Grand Old Party will not tolerate disagreements with Trump.
A Proud Boys leader charged in the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection expressed shock that former President Donald Trump abandoned him and other rioters.
“Alright I’m gonna say it. FUCK TRUMP,” self-described Proud Boys sergeant-at-arms Ethan Nordean said in a Telegram message on Jan. 20. “Fuck him more than Biden. I’ve followed this guy for 4 years and given everything and lost it all.”
Nordean, 30, from Washington state, wrote the grievance after Proud Boys Florida organizer Joseph Biggs, 37, was arrested for his role in the day’s violence, which left five people dead and 140 police officers injured.
“Yes he woke us up, but he led us to believe some great justice was upon us ... and it never happened,” Nordean wrote of Trump in the Telegram message, revealed by federal prosecutors this week. “Now I’ve got some of my good friends and myself facing jail time cuz we followed this guys lead and never questioned it.”
Nordean, who was arrested a week after posting the Telegram message, seemed to realize Trump would not be issuing pardons for him and fellow members of his violent gang.
“We are now and always have been on our own,” Nordean wrote. “So glad he was able to pardon a bunch of degenerates as his last move and shit on us on the way out.”
Nordean, who has been jailed since early February, is charged with attempting to obstruct Congress’s certification of Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory. If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison. He’s also charged with aiding and abetting, knowingly entering or remaining in a restricted building or grounds, and violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds. He has pleaded not guilty.
Even as Republican lawmakers attempt to rewrite history, falsely claiming this week that the insurrectionists are the true Jan. 6 victims, Nordean’s own lawyer has put the blame on Trump for inciting the riot.
“Thousands of people descended on Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6 to protest the result of the 2020 presidential election,” public defender Corey Endothe wrote in a February court filing. “Egged on by Donald Trump, other politicians, his legal advocates, and the news media these people believed the election had been stolen. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people entered the Capitol building as Mr. Nordean is alleged to have done.”
The new Telegram messages uncovered by prosecutors also show how the Proud Boys coordinated their plans for the day’s violence.
“Drag them out by the fucking hair if they steal it,” one member wrote in the chats.
“Let them remember the day they decided to make war with us,” Nordean posted just days before the attack. “Fight we will.”
In April, bail was revoked for both Nordean and Biggs after federal prosecutors successfully argued the two men were central figures in planning the attack.
Trump, upon leaving office, relocated to his Florida country club.
“Fuck you Trump you left us on [t]he battlefield bloody and alone,” Nordean wrote on Trump’s last day in the White House.
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