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

[thwhtGuardian]

Well, this is just stuuuuuupid.

What's really stupid is when you stop and think about how much nike product were the town offices buying before the "ban" I don't know about everyone else but none of my Rec League jerseys or balls have Nike on them...so I'm betting none of their's did either, so it's not so much as a ban but empty posturing.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

What's really stupid is when you stop and think about how much nike product were the town offices buying before the "ban" I don't know about everyone else but none of my Rec League jerseys or balls have Nike on them...so I'm betting none of their's did either, so it's not so much as a ban but empty posturing.

Or hoping to get a shout out from Caramel Caligula at his next rally because the city said "NO!" to that rabble rousing Nike and stood up for American values, yadda, yadda, yadda.

[Kirby101]

I'm sure we already knew this but it never hurts to repeat it.

Haven't we seen Horowitz quoted here as a "serious" commentator?

[Mister Mets]

Cruz has to know that even his fellow Republicans would celebrate him getting beat behind closed doors.

He's going to try hitting his opponent with everything that isn't nailed down.

I know a Republican congressional staffer very well.

He hates Ted Cruz with a vengeance, and would be giddy to see Beto O'Rourke win. He thinks a big reason we have Trump is that Ted Cruz's lies during the 2013 government shutdown led to unrealistic expectations about policy outcomes (Cruz basically claimed that ifRepublicans wanted it badly enough, they could shut down the Affordable Care Act without a majority in the Senate) which led to voters being more likely to support an outsider.

[Mister Mets]

How much? Not one red cent. While Republicans know Bob ‘n’ Weave Brett is unfit for SCOTUS, they’ll confirm him anyway. Those craven cowards fear angering Trump if they don’t give him what he wants, especially in the case of Kavanaugh who figures to be Dolt45’s lifeline to save him from impeachment hearings while gift wrapping evangelicals their holy grail of killing Roe v. Wade.

What indication do you have that Republicans believe Brett Kavanagh is unfit for SCOTUS?

He's conventionally qualified and seen as an intellectual leader in the courts. Conservatives who don't like Trump like this choice.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/...supreme-court/
https://www.politico.com/magazine/st...vanaugh-219081

There are some exaggerated claims against him, although the writers for liberal news organizations like Vox recognize the silliness of those claims on basic examination.

https://www.vox.com/2018/9/7/1782932...earing-perjury

You might think Republicans are wrong for thinking he's a good choice for the court, but the suggestion that they secretly believe he's unfit is nonsense.

[Tami]

I just checked my local public library system, and the Bob Woodward book 'Fear' has, currently, 266 holds on it.

[Mecegirl]

I just checked my local public library system, and the Bob Woodward book 'Fear' has, currently, 266 holds on it.

Haha wow. I had a credit on Audible so i preordered it with my credit. I guess the hunger for this book is super real.

[Iron Maiden]

I may end up ordering "Fear" too

How many times does the GOP have to see corroborating accounts on how unfit, amoral, and stupid Trump is and how dangerous those combinations are for our democracy before it becomes a priority to them? Everything lines up to what Omarosa has said, Anonymous has said and what others have said in whispers or as an "unnamed source". Bob Corke even said the WH has become like an adult day care. But they are still complicit with it all.

I think that they are cynical enough to see if he gets them through the midterms with minimal damage and then continue their undying allegiance to this totally unworthy man. IF they lose enough seats in Congress, maybe they will start to get restless. IF they had the backbone, they would go along with invoking the 25th amendment. They would probably love to have Pence as president instead.

[aja_christopher]

You might think Republicans are wrong for thinking he's a good choice for the court, but the suggestion that they secretly believe he's unfit is nonsense.

He's nothing more than a stolen Supreme Court seat chosen by a corrupt political party that benefited from the illegal political campaign of the Republican candidate known as Donald Trump -- that anyone should think he belongs on the Supreme Court after the "nonsense" McConnell pulled just shows how little integrity is left in the Republican party itself.



He's there to shill for the Federalist Society and to cover Trump's illegal @ss if it comes down to that -- nothing more, nothing less.

[Kirby101]

You might think Republicans are wrong for thinking he's a good choice for the court, but the suggestion that they secretly believe he's unfit is nonsense.

I don't know if they secretly believe Trump is unfit, but that just shows how screwed up the GOP is.

[zinderel]

Brett Kavanaugh’s Lying to Get on the Supreme Court, Like Clarence Thomas Before Him

The best estimate is that he lied five times: about whether he received documents while he worked at the White House that had been purloined from Senate Democratic staff; about his knowledge of the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program; about whether he was involved in formulating any aspects of torture policy; and about his role in the nomination of two controversial Bush-era judicial appointees . . . Sometime soon, the Senate will presumably wave him through, which will mean that two of the nine justices of the Supreme Court will have gotten to the nation’s highest court despite having lied during their confirmation hearings.

The other, of course, was Clarence Thomas, in 1991. I realize this is not settled history, but if you actually read the evidence, you have to be either an idiot or a fervent ideological ally of Thomas’ to think he was telling the truth. He said, repeatedly, and under oath, that he never discussed pornography or his sexual prowess with Anita Hill.

SUCH a qualified, intellectual leader...just like Thomas...

And, since I know that a 'well, actually...' will be made, here's more from the article. Worth a read, especially if you remember the absolute shitshow that was the Clarence Thomas hearings.

Now it’s true that essentially every Court nominee, conservative and liberal, says misleading things about his or her ideology. Everybody knew that Samuel Alito was going to be against Roe v. Wade and Ruth Bader Ginsburg was going to be for it, despite what they may have said at hearing time. That’s a given. But that’s not what we’re talking about here.

This is about lying about their past, their work history, their prior public service. As far as we know, only Kavanaugh and Thomas appear to have lied about that.

Is it just a coincidence that both of these liars are severe right-wingers? After all, liberals lie, too. And liberal men sexually harass women, and I’m sure that over the years a Democratic White House operative or two (or 20) has read material stolen from the other party. So on one level, sure, call it a coincidence.

But looked at another way, it’s not a coincidence at all. And it's not about these men's characters. It's about the goals and methods of the party that advanced them.

With respect to judicial fights, the Republican Party is intent on accomplishing two goals. The first is stacking the Court—actually all federal courts—with hard-right originalists. The second is getting them on the bench in as belligerent and aggressive a way as possible.

As I wrote three weeks ago about the Merrick Garland scandal, the Republican could easily have followed procedure by giving Garland a hearing and voting him down. But they didn’t. They stiff-armed him, President Obama, and the country. Why? Because they could. To show the Democrats that they no longer played by the regular rules.

I would argue that when you put these two factors together, you get judges who are more likely to lie at their hearings. A Democratic president probably would have withdrawn a Clarence Thomas equivalent after the controversy arose; after all, there are plenty of other judges to choose from who probably didn’t put a piece of their pubic hair on a Coke can.

This was clearly the case in 1991, too; George H.W. Bush could have withdrawn Thomas. But Republicans had to win, had to defeat the evil liberals. (It’s true that Ronald Reagan withdrew Douglas Ginsburg in 1987 after allegations arose that he’d smoked pot, but the pressure on that came not from Democrats and liberals but right-wing moralizers like Blackjack Bill Bennett.)

Also, I think a Democratic president would never have nominated a Brett Kavanaugh equivalent in the first place. Kavanaugh’s history was presumably well known to the White House. Not to Donald Trump, obviously, but certainly to the people in the Office of Legal Counsel handling the nomination.

They would have known that he was under suspicion of having lied in 2004. They would have known that his years in the Bush White House would have left a lengthy and quite possibly incriminating paper trail. Democrats are more cautious about these kinds of things, and Republicans could have been, too. The Trump administration had loads of people to choose from who weren’t involved in making torture policy and didn’t read pilfered papers and then mislead the Senate about it under oath 14 years ago.

But they said fuck it. This is our man, and to boot, we’re going to short-circuit the process, hold back documents, let Steve Bannon’s lawyer decide what the Democrats do and don’t get to see, and force a vote before the first Monday in October so that this hard-right ideologue and under-oath liar can take his seat before the next session starts.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2014, 2015, 2016, as well as 2017, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" published profiles of Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin, a Christian theocrat who has somehow, in her mad quest to allow religion to be allowed in state schools and government buildings (including having a pastor brought in to anoint furniture in the state legislature with holy oil), opened a loophole that allowed a Satanic Temple to build a statue of Baphomet, just to prove a point to her about the separation of church and state. Fallin also oversaw a botched double-execution from the comforts of an Oklahoma City Thunder game, not wanting to answer her cell phone while a man died in agony on her watch. Her administration’s oversight, or more specifically its lack thereof on the oil and gas industries in Oklahoma has been so lax that a state whose only concern for natural disasters used to be tornadoes has allowed unregulated fracking so that they now are getting more frequently hit with earthquakes. That’s not hyperbole, either, at one point in August 2017, Oklahoma had 7 earthquakes within a 28 hour span and the strength of the quakes are intensifying, now reaching up into the high 5s on the Richter scale. That’s what happens after seven years of Fallin leadership. And taxing the wealthy and those energy companies? Ha! Oklahoma last year reported a $1.3 billion (yes, BILLION) budget shortfall. She’s also infamous for trying to shut down all the abortion clinics in her state, signing a ban on minimum wage increases during our greatest time of economic inequality in almost a century, and trying to do away with the entire state Supreme Court for not granting her absolute domain to do as she pleases (like not allowing her to put monuments of the Ten Commandments up on government property). Not that she understands the role of the courts as one of the three branches of government, of course, because she failed to be able to correctly list all three during a 2015 speech. In the meantime, Fallin continues to make Sarah Palin seem perhaps less like white trash by allowing her 28-year-old daughter to live on the grounds of the governor’s mansion in her very own trailer, rent-free and siphoning utilities. Mary Fallin is so utterly clueless that she went on CNN in July of 2016 and actually made the ludicrous claim that Donald Trump was “trying to campaign as a racial healer”. Yeah, the guy whose campaign began by saying Mexicans are murderers and rapists, and soon called for a ban on Muslims was trying to unify people of all colors and backgrounds, sure Mary. Only eight days later, she went back on CNN after the release of the 2016 Republican Party Platform, which people on both sides of the aisle recognized as the most anti-LGBT platform the GOP have ever produced (Republicans boasted of this like it was a good thing), but Fallin thought that simply just couldn’t be the case because, “there was a gay person on the committee”. She neglected to mention that the one person on that committee was vocally opposed to every one of those anti-gay measures, and was ignored by the majority. Because of course, that’s just a nagging little detail.

Well, less than a month after we had our last check-in on Gov. Fallin, in October 2016 she actually declared a “Oilfield Prayer Day”, where she no-s***, called for people in her state to ask God for his protection over the oil industry. She then quickly had to correct herself that the prayer was open to people of all faiths, because apparently she didn’t want Satanists to assert their dominance over Oklahoma’s oil and gas industry.

Now in full lame duck status as she winds down the last 15 months of her stint as Oklahoma Governor and facing term limits, Mary Fallin cannot even get her own party, that holds a wide, wide majority in the state legislature, to agree on a budget, admitting that to be “embarrassing”. After managing to piss off the LGBTQ community and the NRA with executive decisions she made on the same day in May of 2018, she would become even more of a pariah after a successful statewide teachers’ strike, Gov. Fallin officially became the least popular governor in the country this year, with her approval ratings dropping to a staggering 19% in July. Based on that, it seems unlikely she’ll be worming her way into a Senate seat or anywhere else in office going forward.

[Gray Lensman]

He's nothing more than a stolen Supreme Court seat chosen by a corrupt political party that benefited from the illegal political campaign of the Republican candidate known as Donald Trump -- that anyone should think he belongs on the Supreme Court after the "nonsense" McConnell pulled just shows how little integrity is left in the Republican party itself.



He's there to shill for the Federalist Society and to cover Trump's illegal @ss if it comes down to that -- nothing more, nothing less.

Here's a clue for everyone who doesn't get it.

If you ask a yes or no question and get neither one for an answer - that's because the answer is whichever is worse, and the person is too gutless to say so to your face. It's a rule of life that has always served me well, and not just for yes or no questions. If the answer is an evasion, then the truth is bad.

By this dodge we know Kavanaugh believes the President is above the law, and given his past he holds it to be exclusive to Republican presidents.

He called birth control "abortion inducing drugs."

And he is a likely vote for more stupid 'religious freedom' laws that protect the right to discriminate. My wife takes antidepressants, the last thing I want is to find out that someone who works behind the counter is a Scientologist who will be protected when he or she refuses to fill the prescription because it runs counter to 'sincerely held religious beliefs.'

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

Here's a clue for everyone who doesn't get it.

If you ask a yes or no question and get neither one for an answer - that's because the answer is whichever is worse, and the person is too gutless to say so to your face. It's a rule of life that has always served me well, and not just for yes or no questions. If the answer is an evasion, then the truth is bad.

By this dodge we know Kavanaugh believes the President is above the law, and given his past he holds it to be exclusive to Republican presidents.

He called birth control "abortion inducing drugs."

And he is a likely vote for more stupid 'religious freedom' laws that protect the right to discriminate. My wife takes antidepressants, the last thing I want is to find out that someone who works behind the counter is a Scientologist who will be protected when he or she refuses to fill the prescription because it runs counter to 'sincerely held religious beliefs.'

I’m not going to defend Kavanaugh at all, but the whole “yes or no” question thing is merely a debate tactic to box someone into a position wholesale. And Harris tries to play that game a lot

[InformationGeek]

And here's Steve King, saying stupid crap as always.

“Nazi” is injected into Leftist talking points because the worn out & exhausted “racist” is over used & applied to everyone who lacks melanin & who fail to virtue signal at the requisite frequency & decibels. But...Nazis were socialists & Leftists are socialists.