All-purpose news and politics thread: Two Steps Beyond!(Part II)

[numberthirty]

Here's the problem ...

With what you laid out?

Best case sceranio, he's a drunk gambler (he admitted to both).

Worst case, a sexual predator (which he denies).

Either way, he lacks good judgment and the moral compass to be on the SCOTUS.

By the way, Ben Shapiro wants his talking points back.

To me, the best reason to go with someone else is that I am relatively certain that there is another potential nominee without any of these question marks.

[BeastieRunner]

To me, the best reason to go with someone else is that I am relatively certain that there is another potential nominee without any of these question marks.

The top 3 good ones on the GOP list were women (1 of those women was on Obama's).

Trump can't have that. It would ruin his image in more than one way. They had others on the list too that didn't come with baggage.

I mean come on ... he just wants somebody that will rubber stamp his fascist tendencies.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

The top 3 good ones on the GOP list were women (1 of those women was on Obama's).

Trump can't have that. It would ruin his image in more than one way. They had others on the list too that didn't come with baggage.

I mean come on ... he just wants somebody that will rubber stamp his fascist tendencies.

And, more importantly, shield him from possible, perhaps probable impeachment hearings should Democrats win big in November.

====================

Tucker Carlson Criticizes Rape Victims Who Don’t Report: ‘You’re Part Of The Problem’

“What about the rest of us?” the Fox News host asked. Once again, Fucker Carlson doesn't understand the fear, terror, shame and revulsion women feel after they've been attacked, forcing them into silence. Or, perhaps he, like his president whom he slurps just doesn't give a rat's ass.

**********

Twitter Users Taunt Donald Trump After World Leaders Openly Laugh At His UN Speech

The president used to complain the United States was a laughingstock to the world. Then the world laughed at him. It was a delicious moment.

**********

Bill Cosby’s Publicist: ‘They Persecuted Jesus And Look What Happened’

“Not saying Mr. Cosby is Jesus, but we know what this country has done to black men for centuries,” Andrew Wyatt said. As far as I know, Jesus wasn't a scumbag rapist, Andy. Just saying.

**********

Twitter Users Burn Sarah Sanders After She Says Every Supreme Court Nominee Deserves A Vote

Remember Merrick Garland? Perhaps Baghdad Betty meant to say "Every Supreme Court nominee CHOSEN BY A REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT deserves a vote".

**********

Beto O’Rourke Defends Senate Rival Ted Cruz After Restaurant Heckling Incident

“The Cruz family should be treated with respect,” O’Rourke said. If the shoe were on the other foot, would Cruz have defended O’Rourke? Hell fucking no!

[Carabas]

The difference is people had a say on Hillary with their vote. Kavanaugh is getting confirmed regardless. So when 33 thinks Hillary has too much baggage it’s relevant because it informs his vote. All of us could think Ford gives the most credible testimony in history and it won’t matter if Republicans are hellbent on him getting confirmed. I really think without a third party pretty much saying they saw something, he’s getting on the court

I remember a hypothetical Kavanaugh being brought up in those discussions back in 2016, as an argument in favour of voting against Trump, and 30's said that the current situation was not happening ever, that the absolute worst case scenario was that Trump would replace Scalia with another Scalia, and he was okay with that.

You do vote for Supremes, albeit indirectly.

[worstblogever]

6 weeks to the election, and the Republican Party have spent the past year:

Failing to criticize White Nationalists taking over their party.
Having several members of its party charged with corruption, including having about a third of the Cabinet resign as a result.
Not just defending pedophiles, drunks, and those who commit sexual harassment, but in some cases insisting they should be elevated to even higher positions of power.
Not just defending locking immigrant children in cages, but redirecting funds from cancer and HIV research to pay for locking those kids in cages.


Don't know why people think a Blue Wave would still be coming, you know?

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2014, 2015, 2016, as well as 2017, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" published profiles of the U.S. House Representative from Iowa’s 4th Congressional District, Steve King, the sitting U.S. House Representative from Iowa's 4th Congressional District, a guy who is perhaps the most unapologetically racist member of the GOP (and that's saying something). Steve King is a man who seems hell bent on being the most venomous xenophobe in the entire Republican Party, showing his contempt for illegal immigrants by often comparing them to animals (considering he’s also proudly defended dog-fighting, it’s not surprising to see him hold as much concern for these human beings as he does animals), and making ludicrous, paranoid claims about how much of a threat they are to the general safety of the average American citizen. He literally has described the process of immigration in the United States as “a slow motion terrorist attack”. Years before Donald Trump ever wanted to build a border wall, Steve King was pitching a giant electrified fence that would keep out illegal immigrants because "it works on cattle". King’s also a huge war hawk, and has defended any action by the United States in the Middle East for the past 15 years, not even taking issue with the atrocities committed in the Abu Ghraib prison by American troops. He’s equally insane on the home front, having once argued that girls are frequently kidnapped out of playgrounds, raped, then taken over state lines to get an abortion, and returned back to the park before anybody knows they’re missing. (Really. I mean, those would be some really oblivious parents, to have the kid missing long enough for a predator to pull all that off before they notice.) In 2015, Steve King chastised President Obama for "apologizing for slavery" because he feels "there's nothing to apologize about". He has complained about undocumented immigrants "bringing in Ebola and beheadings", and defended Donald Trump's comments about Mexican rapists, saying that "Central Americans were doing the raping", in addition. Steve King gave everyone a waft of bigotry strong enough that is was like a blast of smelling salts on the first day of the 2016 Republican National Convention when in the midst of participating in a panel on MSNBC moderated by Chris Hayes, Rep. King gave his thoughts that no "non-white sub-groups" had ever contributed to civilization. The panel erupted in protest at King's ignorant, near-white-supremacist statement, and Hayes had to dump to commercial to avoid it devolving even further than that. Also in 2016, Rep. King compared Syrian refugees to “poisoned grapes”, ranted about the Obama administration’s LGBT protections showed they wouldn’t "be satisfied until all students are “transgendered vegans”, that the country was going "downhill" because women had contraceptive rights, argued it was racist and sexist for people to put Harriet Tubman instead of President Andrew Jackson on the twenty dollar bill, responded to Colin Kaepernick's protests against racial inequality at NFL games by kneeling during the national anthem by accusing him of being in league with ISIS, and while the featured guest of anti-immigrant hate group FAIR, talked about how "no one would have been shot" if everyone in the Orlando Pulse nightclub had a gun (they had an armed off-duty police officer on the premises) and that the GOP shouldn't try and win over Hispanic voters because "we are all God's children". Steve King's own office at the Capitol now proudly has the Confederate flag on display on his desk, even though the last time anybody checked, Iowa wasn't in the Confederacy in the Civil War.

King was re-elected to an eighth term in office in the 2016 elections, defeating Democrat Kim Weaver with 61% of the vote. Weaver was planning a rematch with Steve King in 2018, but dropped out of the running in June of 2017 because, in a shock to no one, there are people who love Steve King even though he’s an uncaring raging racist ***hole who, are themselves ***holes. And some of those ***holes loyal to Steve King apparently started to send death threats to Weaver.

[worstblogever]

Rep. King has become even more of an unflinching, white nationalist bigot over the past two years, which is something we didn’t think was possible:

• February 16th, 2017: King votes for HJR 69, to make it legal for hunters on wildlife reserves to kill several species of hibernating bears or wolves while they’re sleeping.
• March 12th, 2017: Rep. King already has a pretty well-established rapport with European white nationalists like Marine LePen of France and Geert Wilders of Belgium, and over this weekend, on his Twitter account, he posted an Islamophobic cartoon, then quoted Wilders and said he was right about refugees because “We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies”. After wide criticism in the following days, Steve King not only refused to apologize, but doubled down, saying, “I meant exactly what I said” and that he wanted the United States to be “so homogenous”.
• March 16th, 2017: Steve King votes for HR 1181, which would allow veterans deemed mentally incompetent to continue to own firearms, and not have them taken away without a judge's written order.
• March 28th, 2017: Rep. King votes for SJ Res 34, which allowed internet providers to sell the data information of their customers' internet usage to businesses.
• May 4th, 2017: King votes for the House GOP's healthcare plan, that would kick roughly 24 million people off their health insurance plans, allow up to 28,000 more people to die a year, give $50,000 in tax breaks to millionaires, and would eliminate coverage for pre-existing conditions which would include such medical conditions as pregnancy (current or past), postpartum depression, or prior sexual assault. Oh, and a provision in the bill would make sure that King would be allowed to keep his healthcare plan as it exists under the ACA, which would be repealed for the rest of the country. He and his Republican compatriots threw themselves a beer bash to celebrate taking away healthcare from millions and then gloated about it with Donald Trump at a White House press conference, as well.
• June 8th, 2017: Steve King votes for HR 10, the GOP’s attempt to repeal Dodd-Frank financial reform, because what the country really needs is to allow the big banks to make the same mistakes that imploded the economy only a decade earlier.
• September 5th, 2017: King is practically gleeful upon hearing the news that Donald Trump had announced he was going to allow the delayed deportation of Dreamers, or DACA, to expire, and went on Breitbart News to mockingly say that the action would effectively “create a Peace Corps-like force” that would allow deported Dreamers to teach their home countries “how a civilized people interact with each other.” Why, yes, that’s revoltingly racist, and a disgusting insult to those countries, if you weren’t sure.
• September 14th, 2017: Rep. King, outraged that Donald Trump was rumored to have caved and cut a deal with the Democratic leadership in Congress, raged in impotent fury about it to Fox News’ Todd Starnes on his radio programming, making the insane demand that any deal should feature revoking birthright citizenship as it is granted in the 16th Amendment of the Constitution.
• October 3rd, 2017: King votes for HR 36, the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, that would try to create an unconstitutional ban abortion at 20 weeks (even though medical science tells us fetuses do not have the capability to feel pain until 29 weeks).
• December 1st, 2017: After a jury finds the killer of Katie Steinle not guilty of murder, Rep. King reacts by accusing several of his black and Latino House colleagues of having “deified criminal illegal aliens” and fostered “an anti-white, anti-Western civilization culture.” Because that’s a healthy response.
• December 19th, 2017: Steve King votes for HR 1, the GOP’s $1.7 trillion tax cut to benefit the wealthiest Americans and corporations permanently that coincidentally also removes the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate and kicks 13 million people off their health insurance.
• February 18th, 2018: King and his fellow Republicans decide that poor big businesses are suffering too much at the hands of the Americans with Disabilities Act too much, and votes for HR 620, which would strip most of the civil rights protections guaranteed by it.
• March 9th, 2018: Steve King reacts to the earliest rumors of the impending retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy by trying to stump for HR 490, an anti-choice bill he sponsored that would ban abortion if a fetal heartbeat can be detected, or in other words, at about six weeks along, and before many women can even realize they’re pregnant.
• July 17th, 2018: Rep. King is one of many Republican Congressmen who during a Judiciary Committee hearing, pushes the false narrative that conservatives are “censored” by social media engines online, citing his disappointment at how many articles from the garbage website Gateway Pundit he can find online.
• September 12th, 2018: Steve King quotes White Supremacist Lana Lokteff in a Twitter post where he accuses “Leftists” of being the “real Nazis”.
• September 23rd, 2018: Only hours before reports emerge of MORE accusers coming forward to report sexual assaults they had committed against them by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, Steve King decides to join the chorus of Republicans defending him by saying, the charges amounted to “character assassination” and normalized sexual assault by saying “If that’s the new standard, no man will ever qualify for the Supreme Court again”.

A reminder that Iowa's 4th District has a modest +5 Republican lean in the Cook Partisan Voting Index, That Cook Partisan rating might be a bit of an understatement, though, as Steve King’s Congressional District has roughly 60,000 registered Republican voters in it to start with, who don’t seem to mind the fact that he’s gone full white nationalist of late, but then again, his district is staggeringly white. We’re talking like mayonnaise sandwich white. King’s opponent in November (who we cannot cheer on enough) is J.D. Scholten, a former minor-league baseball player with the Sioux City Explorers turned attorney whose roots in Iowa go back five generations. Polling agencies and prognosticators have looked closely at the race, and are reporting that this race is going to be as close as any in the district since 2010. and at the moment, Scholten is beating King in fundraising, to boot.

We’re looking VERY forward to November 6th at the moment, and if we read the news on the 7th and find out that a hateful bigot live Steve King is no longer going to be in Congress, we’ll be over the moon, and thank J.D. Scholten and his voters for getting that done.

[KOSLOX]

On this date in 2014, 2015, 2016, as well as 2017, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" published profiles of the U.S. House Representative from Iowa’s 4th Congressional District, Steve King, the sitting U.S. House Representative from Iowa's 4th Congressional District, a guy who is perhaps the most unapologetically racist member of the GOP (and that's saying something). Steve King is a man who seems hell bent on being the most venomous xenophobe in the entire Republican Party, showing his contempt for illegal immigrants by often comparing them to animals (considering he’s also proudly defended dog-fighting, it’s not surprising to see him hold as much concern for these human beings as he does animals), and making ludicrous, paranoid claims about how much of a threat they are to the general safety of the average American citizen. He literally has described the process of immigration in the United States as “a slow motion terrorist attack”. Years before Donald Trump ever wanted to build a border wall, Steve King was pitching a giant electrified fence that would keep out illegal immigrants because "it works on cattle". King’s also a huge war hawk, and has defended any action by the United States in the Middle East for the past 15 years, not even taking issue with the atrocities committed in the Abu Ghraib prison by American troops. He’s equally insane on the home front, having once argued that girls are frequently kidnapped out of playgrounds, raped, then taken over state lines to get an abortion, and returned back to the park before anybody knows they’re missing. (Really. I mean, those would be some really oblivious parents, to have the kid missing long enough for a predator to pull all that off before they notice.) In 2015, Steve King chastised President Obama for "apologizing for slavery" because he feels "there's nothing to apologize about". He has complained about undocumented immigrants "bringing in Ebola and beheadings", and defended Donald Trump's comments about Mexican rapists, saying that "Central Americans were doing the raping", in addition. Steve King gave everyone a waft of bigotry strong enough that is was like a blast of smelling salts on the first day of the 2016 Republican National Convention when in the midst of participating in a panel on MSNBC moderated by Chris Hayes, Rep. King gave his thoughts that no "non-white sub-groups" had ever contributed to civilization. The panel erupted in protest at King's ignorant, near-white-supremacist statement, and Hayes had to dump to commercial to avoid it devolving even further than that. Also in 2016, Rep. King compared Syrian refugees to “poisoned grapes”, ranted about the Obama administration’s LGBT protections showed they wouldn’t "be satisfied until all students are “transgendered vegans”, that the country was going "downhill" because women had contraceptive rights, argued it was racist and sexist for people to put Harriet Tubman instead of President Andrew Jackson on the twenty dollar bill, responded to Colin Kaepernick's protests against racial inequality at NFL games by kneeling during the national anthem by accusing him of being in league with ISIS, and while the featured guest of anti-immigrant hate group FAIR, talked about how "no one would have been shot" if everyone in the Orlando Pulse nightclub had a gun (they had an armed off-duty police officer on the premises) and that the GOP shouldn't try and win over Hispanic voters because "we are all God's children". Steve King's own office at the Capitol now proudly has the Confederate flag on display on his desk, even though the last time anybody checked, Iowa wasn't in the Confederacy in the Civil War.

King was re-elected to an eighth term in office in the 2016 elections, defeating Democrat Kim Weaver with 61% of the vote. Weaver was planning a rematch with Steve King in 2018, but dropped out of the running in June of 2017 because, in a shock to no one, there are people who love Steve King even though he’s an uncaring raging racist ***hole who, are themselves ***holes. And some of those ***holes loyal to Steve King apparently started to send death threats to Weaver.

Not only did Iowa not support the confederacy, it was extremely pro-Union and sent proportionately more soldiers to fight than any other state.

But, SK wouldn't know anything about that since he enrolled in school just to avoid service and then quit when he realized he wouldn't get drafted.

[4saken1]

Here's the problem...

What you've laid out? Rape cases have also wound up in acquittal on more than what there is here.

Either way, that's not what we are talking about here.

Yes. Republicans keep acting like this is a criminal case and that the same burden of proof - 'guilty beyond a reasonable doubt' needs to be achieved before Kavanaugh can be denied his rightful seat on the Supreme Court. This is not the case. In a situation like this, where there is significant doubt about his character, we should air on the side of caution. He's not going to lose anything if he doesn't get the position. He'll still have his job, his freedom.

[Iron Maiden]

6 weeks to the election, and the Republican Party have spent the past year:

Failing to criticize White Nationalists taking over their party.
Having several members of its party charged with corruption, including having about a third of the Cabinet resign as a result.
Not just defending pedophiles, drunks, and those who commit sexual harassment, but in some cases insisting they should be elevated to even higher positions of power.
Not just defending locking immigrant children in cages, but redirecting funds from cancer and HIV research to pay for locking those kids in cages.


Don't know why people think a Blue Wave would still be coming, you know?

And I would add to this I don't understand why good church going people vote for these schmucks. And some of them are my relatives.

I guess that's wrong. I do know that part of it is Roe v Wade.

[Iron Maiden]

Yes. Republicans keep acting like this is a criminal case and that the same burden of proof - 'guilty beyond a reasonable doubt' needs to be achieved before Kavanaugh can be denied his rightful seat on the Supreme Court. This is not the case. In a situation like this, where there is significant doubt about his character, we should air on the side of caution. He's not going to lose anything if he doesn't get the position. He'll still have his job, his freedom.

QFT. I was just going to say that the character issue is most important because this man is going to sit in judgment of other people at some point. His suitabilty for the most honored position in his profession is seriously in doubt. There was a time when just smoking a joint didn't get you onto the court.

In cases like this, where we are seeing more evidence of his views toward women cropping up. How about how he cut off his wife from answering a question that was specifically posed to her by the interviewer on Fox. How about those salacious questions he gave to Kenneth Starr for the Clinton case?

In the case of Mrs. Ford, she has friends that are willing to verify that she started talking about this incident to them going back 4 or 5 years. She had seen something about his ascension to a federal judgeship and that upset her to see his name in print getting elevated to this high position.

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

And I would add to this I don't understand why good church going people vote for these schmucks. And some of them are my relatives.

I guess that's wrong. I do know that part of it is Roe v Wade.

Abortion is huge to them. People don’t realize how big of a gap that is for pro life and pro choice people. One side literally views it as the equivalent to legalized child murder. They feel like there is no difference between an abortion and a doctor suffocating a child right after it’s born. If you’re someone who believes that full stop, it’s going to be one of the biggest issues to you and will supersede a lot of reservations. It’s a huge card in the GOP’s favor. Trump would lose more support amongst Republican tomorrow if he came out as Pro Choice than if someone accused him of rape tomorrow and it was a very credible allegation.

[Vic Vega]

And I would add to this I don't understand why good church going people vote for these schmucks. And some of them are my relatives.

I guess that's wrong. I do know that part of it is Roe v Wade.

The Pharisees were churchgoers too.

Church Going is mostly about the appearance of righteousness (while never admitting to yourself that is the case). How else do you get a
Protestant Church that flies in the face of every value that Jesus reportedly held when he was alive.

ESPECIALLY Jesus' attitude towards wealth.

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

Yes. Republicans keep acting like this is a criminal case and that the same burden of proof - 'guilty beyond a reasonable doubt' needs to be achieved before Kavanaugh can be denied his rightful seat on the Supreme Court. This is not the case. In a situation like this, where there is significant doubt about his character, we should air on the side of caution. He's not going to lose anything if he doesn't get the position. He'll still have his job, his freedom.

Again... and I brought this up before, they are of the opinion that they have the power to confirm his nomination and that the standard by which they hold this allegation is personal to their decision to confirm him. They see many decade long benefits to their agenda for confirming him, so they are incentivized to make it a very high standard before they reject him.

It’s double edged. People saying it’s not a criminal trial are also people who would largely benefit from him not being confirmed and delaying the process until the Democrats can potential retake the Senate. So there is an incentive on that end to have a very low standard to dismiss him.

The more prudent thing is probably somewhere in the middle. A mere question of an allegation shouldn’t take him down and there should probably be some serious corroborating evidence, but it shouldn’t be so rigorous to be beyond reasonable doubt.

Most of this is political posturing. Which is sad and cynical, but it is what it is.

[ZombieHavoc]

Ha, again everyone is very interested in Mets opinion on the BK stuff.

You guys didn't already know what his opinion/answers were going to be?