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

[JCAll]

What I learned today, is there is not a single decent Republican in Congress.

You didn't suspect that already?

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Trump, Kim Fail To Reach Agreement In Hanoi After Talks Abruptly Collapse

Kim wanted sanctions to be “lifted in their entirety and we wouldn’t do that,” the president said. No agreement, eh? And Donnie Smallhands boasted that he was a great dealmaker. Was that yet another lie? Probably. Did IQ45 REALLY think Kim was going to give up his nukes when the paranoid little troll believes they're the only thing keeping him from winding up like Moammar Ghadaffi and Saddam Hussein, i.e., dead?

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Michael Cohen’s Testimony To The House Oversight Committee Had Some Wild Moments

Trump’s former personal attorney discussed WikiLeaks, alleged hush money payments and more. If, as I suspect, the GOP's goal was to turn the hearing into a three ring shitshow, I think they succeeded.

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Lays Groundwork For Going After Trump’s Tax Returns

Other Democrats, including Reps. Katie Hill and Ro Khanna, grilled Michael Cohen on Trump’s business dealings, possibly raising new legal issues for the president. Looks like Caramel Caligula will be spending a fair amount of time looking over his shoulder. Good!

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Virginia’s First Lady Gave Cotton To Black Kids, Asked Them To Imagine Slavery

Pamela Northam said she was trying to illustrate “a painful period of Virginia history.” What the fuck is this shit?

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Michael Cohen: There Will ‘Never Be A Peaceful Transition Of Power’ If Trump Loses In 2020

The statement was especially dark considering Cohen was Trump’s personal attorney for more than 10 years. Considering Trump is a sore loser, he'll either refuse to leave the White House, claiming the election was rigged against him, or he'll skip out of town in the middle of the night rather than meet with his successor. And Republicans in deep with Mango Mussolini will support the assclown to the bitter end.

[worstblogever]

In both 2015, and in 2016, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profiled Gene Alday, a member of the Mississippi House of Representatives who is a pro-life and pro-death penalty, Voter ID supporting, climate-change denying, God fearin’ American who also happened to be quoted in 2015 saying, “I come from a town where all the blacks are getting food stamps and what I call 'welfare crazy checks.' They don't work.I had to go to the emergency room for pain. I liked to died. I laid in there for hours because they (blacks) were in there being treated for gunshots." But don’t worry, in his apology for those remarks, Alday insisted he was being taken out of context, just like the majority of Republicans do when they frequently say racist things. Alday lost his seat in the Mississippi House of Representatives in the 2015 elections, and hopefully will not be heard from again.

On this date in 2017, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" profiled Angela Kaaihue, who has taken two shots at running for the U.S. House of Representatives for Hawaii's 2nd Congressional District in 2016. She describes herself as a "real estate developer", and has previously failed to be elected Mayor of Honolulu. Kaaihue's first attempt at getting elected to Congress in 2016 was actually in the special election for Hawaii's 1st Congressional District, where she bizarrely ran as a Democrat trying to replace the Congressman Mark Takai, who was dying from pancreatic cancer. She was utterly wrecked by Colleen Hanabusa, only receiving 3% of the overall vote. Perhaps her poor performance had something to do with her choice to run campaign advertising where she proudly declared herself "healthy and cancer-free" as a positive trait, and later gave a radio interview where she defended her ads, saying, "Would you want to vote for someone who has cancer?" She then continued to dig the hole even deeper when she later added the assessment that, “If you have cancer, it's almost like having AIDS, you don't want people to know." Now, given how disastrous her performance was in the special election, one would hope the Republican Party wouldn't welcome someone with a questionable educational background and poor campaigning skills into their ranks with open arms. Alas, the Hawaii GOP did just that, and had Angela Kaaihue as a candidate in the primary to run against their chosen son, Eric Hafner... and she won with 56% of the vote. And that decision blew up right in their faces, almost immediately. It was just a tad disconcerting, perhaps, to GOP insiders that Kaaihue actually was arrested in 2013, sentenced to probation, and ordered to undergo a mental health exam. Or maybe they should have balked because she chose to have a website that looked, at best, like a Myspace page with auto-playing music when you went to it. And they chose not to get upset about the fact that Kaaihue was a fanatical Christian who believes that a Christian religious identity supersedes any other qualifications for office, and put out bigoted campaign ads to tout herself as a Christian, and try and attack Tulsi Gabbard, her opponent, for being Hindu. She then took it a step further by claiming both Rep. Gabbard, and her previous opponent, Rep. Hanabusa, were both devil-worshippers, or that a vote for Gabbard was "a vote for Satan". And then, for whatever reason, Kaaihue decided to get on Facebook, and start hysterically ranting about Japanese people in a now-deleted post where she said they were "murderous", "lieing" (sic), "stealing," and "conspirators." She told them to go back to Japan and "eat your fucking radiation at Fukushima you f***ing low life scum," among other things. When the local media asked her to explain herself, she walked her comments back, although continued to underline that she was a theocratic Christian twit when she said, "I truly regret posting that about Japanese people. I don’t think all Japanese people are bad, I just think that the non-Christian Japanese people.” (NOTE: That didn't help.) Kaaihue was disavowed by the GOP, and of course responded rationally to being denounced by the Hawaii GOP. HA! Of course she didn't. She started raving on social media further about it, getting even more fanatical than normal, and insisting that everyone was silencing her, a true "Messenger of God". Kaaihue got crushed by Tulsi Gabbard, getting a little less than 19% of the vote against her in the general election that year. She is likely too toxic politically for any party, even the GOP, from giving her a chance to run for any office going forward.


Jeffrey Guice
It was one year ago today that “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” first profiled Jeffrey Guice, who was first elected to the Mississippi House of Representatives back in 2007 by running unopposed, and other than a challenger who he crushed by over 40 points in the GOP Primary in 2015, has been allowed to have a career as a legislator without any competition whatsoever. Guice’s odds of seeing a challenger in 2019 went up, though, in 2019 because after a mother wrote to him to express her difficulties in getting her Medicaid benefits to cover the cost of her daughter’s medications for her Type 1 diabetes to keep her alive, Guice responded to her e-mail thusly:

"I am sorry for your problem. Have you thought about buying the supplies with money that you earn?"

The parents, between the two of them, were working three jobs to cover medical expenses. And they posted Guice’s response (one of only 3 they received from state legislators) onto Facebook, prompting him to apologize to try and save his own ass politically, going forward. But really, Guice was probably too busy trying to preserve the public glorification of the Confederacy to bother trying to save a poor diabetic girl’s life.

That’s actually understating how awful his legislative career is:

• March 14th, 2012: Guice votes for HB 921, a GOP “Voter ID” bill aimed at suppressing the vote in the state.
• April 1st, 2014: Jeffrey Guice votes for HB 1400, a ban on abortion at 20 weeks that flies in the face of the Roe v. Wade ruling.
• February 17th, 2016: Guice votes for HB 786, a nice little bill to allow people to be authorized to carry firearms in church.
• February 25th, 2016: Jeffrey Guice votes for HB 519, an anti-choice bill to prohibit “dismemberment abortions”, which might mean a D&E, but who can even tell with these anti-abortion morons anymore.
• March 2nd, 2016: Guice votes for HB 983, to make it easier for parents to get exemptions for having to get their children vaccinated.
• March 26th, 2016: Jeffrey Guice votes for HB 683, to authorize the use of the gas chamber, the firing squad, and the electric chair as possible means of execution in Mississippi.
• February 5th, 2018: Guice votes for HB 1510, a ban on abortion on 15 weeks even more likely to be overturned by a judge than the 20 week ban Guice voted for four years earlier.

When you put all that together with his exchange with his constituent simply trying to keep her daughter alive… suffice to say Jeffrey Guice is kind of a ****hole. Hopefully the voters in his district in Mississippi get someone to vote for who seems like they prioritize keeping children alive when he’s up for re-election this November. At least, we’d hope that’s the case.

[aja_christopher]

An acknowledgement of a rationale is not an endorsement. We should all be able to understand where other sides are coming from, even if the results are abhorrent.

That said, I haven't made any statements about denying people the right to vote based on skin color. We haven't discussed any specific policy. Those arguments will often be thornier.

I'm really in agreement here.

So long as you continue to vote for a party that blatantly and at times overtly utilizes racism to win votes (see both Obama and Trump) then we are not in agreement, Mets.

Add to that their general stance and behaviors with regards to: climate change, abortion (women's) rights, LGBT rights, gun control (or lack thereof), education spending (or lack thereof while boosting military spending unnecessarily), immigrant detainment and child separation, gerrymandering, government corruption, aiding and abetting foreign powers to subvert our democratic process, voter disenfranchisement, evangelical control of government functions, health care, social security, discriminatory city planning, military intervention (the Iraq War), deficit spending, and probably a dozen more that will come to me long after I finish typing this post.

It's not a matter of "thorny policy issues" Mets -- it's your entire party.

Honestly, I feel like you're the Paul Ryan of the boards -- lots of talk about ideals while your leaders (Trump, Pence, McConnell, Bush Jr and Cheney) never live up to them.

[ZombieHavoc]

This cracked me up.

Cohen Testimony Leaves Kim Jong Un Doubting Whether Trump Can Be Trusted
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/boro...can-be-trusted

The testimony of the former Trump lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, has left the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, concerned that Donald J. Trump “cannot be trusted,” sources close to Kim revealed on Wednesday.

Kim reportedly was glued to his television as Cohen’s testimony was beamed live to Hanoi, and his “jaw dropped” at the lawyer’s revelations about Trump’s mendacity and unethical business practices, according to the sources.

“Dear Leader became increasingly alarmed about the picture Cohen was painting of Trump,” one source said. “At one point, he turned to the rest of us and said, ‘What kind of lowlife am I dealing with?’ ”

According to the source, Kim was also disturbed by what he saw as the “stunningly disingenuous and unsavory” behavior by some of Cohen’s interrogators on the congressional panel.

“That Jim Jordan seems like a real dick,” Kim reportedly said.

[ZombieHavoc]

Honestly, I feel like you're the Paul Ryan of the boards -- lots of talk about ideals while your leaders (Trump, Pence, McConnell, Bush Jr and Cheney) never live up to them.

You don't think all of those men lived up to the ideals of the republican party? They all did a lot of really shitty stuff, so I think they got it pretty spot on.

[aja_christopher]

You don't think all of those men lived up to the ideals of the republican party? They all did a lot of really shitty stuff, so I think they got it pretty spot on.

Agreed -- but so long as Mets doesn't see it that way, it's useless to bring that up to him.

Like the deficit, corruption only matters to Republicans when they can use it as a political weapon against the opponent, so why even bother.

I recall him explaining Cheney and Rumsfield's "rationale" for falsifying information and leading us into the Iraq War -- in his view, it was just Republicans doing what they thought was "best" for the country.

That should tell you everything you need to know about his reasoning.

[ZombieHavoc]

I recall him explaining Cheney and Rumsfield's "rationale" for falsifying information and leading us into the Iraq War -- in his view, it was just Republicans doing what they thought was "best" for the country.

That should tell you everything you need to know about his reasoning.

The thought of anyone in 2019 or whenever it was in the past couple of years trying to spin Cheney's involvement in Iraq as good intentions is hilarious.

[SuperiorIronman]

This cracked me up.

Cohen Testimony Leaves Kim Jong Un Doubting Whether Trump Can Be Trusted
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/boro...can-be-trusted

Y'know you got it bad when even Kim Jong Un is saying that Trump is untrustworthy.

[Kirby101]

2020 presidential, Senate (one-third of the Senate seats) and House elections cannot come too quickly for the Republicans.

Amen to that Zets! Vote the whole Party into minority oblivion.

[Kirby101]

You didn't suspect that already?

Sometimes, there was one or two who where not completely worthless. Not anymore.

[aja_christopher]

"Majority-white school districts received $23 billion more in funding than nonwhite ones"

"Majority-white school districts received $23 billion more in funding than majority-nonwhite school districts in 2016 despite both groups serving nearly the same amount of students, a new report has found.

The new report released Tuesday by EdBuild, a research and advocacy group based in New Jersey that focuses on education funding, found that the gap in funding was largely due to the school-funding system’s reliance on local property taxes, The Washington Post reported.

The report found that overwhelmingly white communities tended to be wealthier and thus paid significantly more money in property taxes. That, in turn, significantly affected the majority-white school districts’ ability to raise more money. And although nonwhite districts were reportedly found to have received slightly more money per student from the state than provided to majority-white districts, the increase was not enough to counter the gap in funding disparities in many states.

The nonwhite school districts were reportedly found to be significantly larger than the white school districts but both groups serviced roughly the same number of students.

However, nonwhite districts reportedly received $54 billion from local property taxes in 2016, which amounted to nearly $4,500 per student, and white districts took in over $77 billion, or roughly $7,000 per student. States reportedly gave nonwhite districts nearly $7,200 per student and white districts about $6,900 per student.

But overall, the gap in state and local tax dollars amounted to roughly $23 billion.

Majority-white districts were also found to have received $2,000 more in funding per student than majority-nonwhite districts."

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-w...illion-more-in

[WestPhillyPunisher]

This cracked me up.

Cohen Testimony Leaves Kim Jong Un Doubting Whether Trump Can Be Trusted
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/boro...can-be-trusted

Heh! I got a few chuckles out of that piece.

[Kirby101]

BREAKING: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu indicted in corruption cases

Another criminal running a country.

[Iron Maiden]

Whew.....I was only able to digest some of the highlights. I mostly avoided the GOP foaming at the mouth examples. But these were the best or most revealing parts to me.

Rep. Cummings closing remarks where he reached out to Cohen, mentioned seeing his daughter in leg braces as he entered the courthouse. This was one human being reaching out to another to help him on his path to become a better person.

AOC revealing another corrupt part of Trump's business by getting Michael Cohen to testify about Trump Corporation inflating the worth of their assets for insurance purposes or for obtaining loans. I think she was on for only about 5 minutes and accomplished more than the hysterics of GOP combined.

Cohen testifying that he was in Trump's office when Roger Stone's call was on speaker when the called Trump to say that he just got off the phone with Julian Assange and that WikiLeaks had the hacked email files ready to go.