All Purpose News and Politics Thread Part IV: The Center Cannot Hold

[Gray Lensman]

He is just the scum of the earth. What an awful, awful human being.

Why are you insulting scum by comparing it to Alex Jones?

Jones isn't just the bottom of the barrel, he's the bottom of the septic tank.

[Theleviathan]

Why are you insulting scum by comparing it to Alex Jones?

Jones isn't just the bottom of the barrel, he's the bottom of the septic tank.

Pfft. Now you're being mean to septic tanks and human waste

[Gray Lensman]

Pfft. Now you're being mean to septic tanks and human waste

True, one can still get some use out of sewage.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Pfft. Now you're being mean to septic tanks and human waste

Bah! Jones is the lone turd that refuses to go down the bowl and just spins around after hitting the flush lever.

[Tami]

Where does your plastic go? Global investigation reveals America's dirty secret

What happens to your plastic after you drop it in a recycling bin?

According to promotional materials from America’s plastics industry, it is whisked off to a factory where it is seamlessly transformed into something new.

This is not the experience of Nguyễn Thị Hồng Thắm, a 60-year-old Vietnamese mother of seven, living amid piles of grimy American plastic on the outskirts of Hanoi. Outside her home, the sun beats down on a Cheetos bag; aisle markers from a Walmart store; and a plastic bag from ShopRite, a chain of supermarkets in New Jersey, bearing a message urging people to recycle it.

Tham is paid the equivalent of $6.50 a day to strip off the non-recyclable elements and sort what remains: translucent plastic in one pile, opaque in another.

A Guardian investigation has found that hundreds of thousands of tons of US plastic are being shipped every year to poorly regulated developing countries around the globe for the dirty, labor-intensive process of recycling. The consequences for public health and the environment are grim.

[wjowski]

Speaking of "youtube sources":

Alex "Inforwars" Jones might actually end up getting killed in jail.

...What a tragedy that would be.

[Dalak]

I would suggest it's hard to take that claim seriously because "the media" is so vague it's not helpful. You're going to have to be more specific about which network and who. Otherwise you're doing the boogeyman thing.

https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/20...r-learn/223499 <-Many links within the story and the quoted area alone, too many to repost.

Yet as the Republican National Committee and Trump campaign latched onto Barr's claim, many journalists did the same.

Tweets from the RNC and the Trump campaign called special attention to this line, seemingly as a defense against obstruction accusations. Right-wing media figures such as Katie Pavlich, The Daily Caller’s Amber Athey, Breitbart’s Joel Pollak, The Daily Wire’s Ryan Saavedra, Fox Business’ Trish Regan, and Fox News’ Howard Kurtz followed suit.

But numerous less-partisan outlets and other journalists also shared Barr's quote on Twitter without providing necessary context.

https://www.npr.org/2019/04/18/71466...mueller-report

NPR's Susan Davis is among those who are here and have been listening along. What did you hear there Sue that struck you?

SUSAN DAVIS, BYLINE: I will leave the legal conclusions to my colleagues, but I will say politically, I don't think that could have gone better for Donald Trump, for the presidency and for this White House. Attorney General Barr unequivocally said repeatedly on multiple occasions, absolutely no evidence that the president, his campaign or any American, for that matter, in any way colluded with the Russian government to undermine the 2016 elections. That is consistent with every - with the president's defense of himself throughout this entire process. And I think this is a good day for the president.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Trump Administration To Deploy 1,000 Additional Troops To Middle East

The Pentagon announced Monday the deployment of about 1,000 American troops to the Middle East, citing concerns about a potential threat from Iran. A threat I'm still not fully sold on.

**********

Trump Says ICE Will Begin ‘Removing Millions Of Illegal Aliens’ Next Week

The president also suggested in a tweet that Guatemala was “getting ready to sign” a safe third-country agreement with the U.S. It wouldn't surprise me if those revelations were news to both ICE and Guatemala.

**********

Rep. Katie Porter Of California Joins Democrats Calling For Impeachment Inquiry

The congresswoman is California’s first freshman House member to join the chorus of Democrats who support an impeachment inquiry into President Trump. And that particular drumbeat grows ever louder.

**********

Missouri Man Who Pleaded Guilty To Molesting 11-Year-Old Girl Gets Probation

Joseph Meili’s plea agreement removed kidnapping and statutory rape charges. Predictably, said man was lily white. If he'd been black or Latino, that judge would've thrown him in prison for life. White privilege, baby!

**********

Democratic Voters Don’t Actually Understand ‘Medicare For All,’ New Report Says

They have some pretty important misconceptions, though the political implications aren’t clear.

[worstblogever]

Speaking of "youtube sources":

Alex "Inforwars" Jones might actually end up getting killed in jail.

A reminder, Trump praised Alex Jones and InfoWars during the 2016 campaign.

[worstblogever]

It was on this date in 2015 that "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" profiled of of the former candidate for U.S. House of Representatives from North Carolina, Ilario Pantano, who became a right wing cult hero by, y’know, being accused of war crimes and arrested and put on trial for murdering two detained Iraqi citizens and displaying their corpses with a banner that said, “No better friend, no worse enemy” while serving in Operation: Iraqi Freedom. After a military trial where even several soldiers in his unit testified against him, media pundits like Michael Savage and U.S. House Rep. Walter Jones fought to have him cleared of all charges, and he was. But the GOP were not content to have a potential war criminal cleared of all charges and thought someone accused of murder overseas also made a great candidate for U.S. Congress, and ran Pantano as a Tea Party candidate in 2010, and he appeared along the campaign trail promising to fight against a “victory mosque” at 9-11’s Ground Zero, and making appearances with Pamela Geller, and other members of anti-Islamic hate groups. He currently has been appointed as the Assistant Secretary to the North Carolina Veteran’s Affairs Commission by Gov. Pat McCrory, but stepped down in May of 2016. It seems his time in the limelight is over.

In 2016, 2017, and 2018, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” presented its original profile of the current U.S. House Representative from Pennsylvania’s 9th Congressional District, Bill Shuster, who is a political legacy. Bill was first elected to serve Pennsylvania’s 9th way back in the 2000 elections after his father, fourteen term Congressman Bud Shuster, retired. Bud, a Chairman of the House Transportation Committee, was forced into retirement by multiple ethics investigations that he was accepting gifts from lobbyists, and using a former aide turned lobbyist, Ann Eddard, to speak on his behalf, actually trying to hide in the backseat of Eddard’s car while 60 minutes tried to get him to comment on the arrangement. Like father, like son, apparently. Because Bill Shuster has pushed the boundaries of what is acceptable behavior as the head of the House Transportation Committee, admitting in April of 2015 that he has been dating a lobbyist for Airlines for America. But before they announced it publicly, you see, they finalized Bill’s divorce from his wife of twenty years, and then signed documents to assure that his new squeeze wouldn’t lobby Bill directly (how romantic). Now, his gal pal would only lobby the entire rest of the committee that he runs and leave him be. See? Totally no influence there, right? I mean, other than the fact that Shuster keeps hiring people from Airlines for America to positions in his office and to be staff directors for the Transportation Committee in a way that sounds more like arranged marriages on Game of Thrones than part of a democracy. Because we are now in an era where our Congressmen can LITERALLY be in bed with lobbyists. Bill Shuster is also a climate change denier, insisting that there’s still “debate” on the subject, in spite of 98% of scientists saying the data is conclusive. And in 2009, he posted his own evidence that it didn’t exist at all… the weather forecast for Copenhagen… in December. And there was snow. So obviously it can’t be getting hotter if a balmy place like Denmark was seeing snow! In 2013, he introduced legislation to make any new rules enforced by the Environmental Protection Agency first require Congressional approval because he felt the organization was “running rampant”. (It’s not hard to imagine what an EPA being hamstrung by GOP obstructionism and a resentment of science would be faced with.) But perhaps the worst kind of denialism you’ll see from Bill Shuster is his efforts to petition his fellow members of Congress to not recognize the Armenian genocide of 1915, where over a million Armenians were killed, saying, “the events of 1915…did not constitute genocide because over two million Ottoman Kurds, Arabs, and Muslims…also suffered in this conflict.” Shuster told his colleagues that adopting the resolution to recognize something that clearly happened would be “cataclysmic”, and fearing what our Mid-East ally Turkey might think if they were forced to acknowledge a dark chapter of their own history, a century later. As far as the rest of Shuster’s voting record goes, he was around to vote for the Iraq War Resolution, and in 2006, was a co-sponsor of a bill that attempted to create a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage as well as to support the "Abortion Pain Bill", which would create an unconstitutional ban on abortion at 20 weeks. Bill Shuster voted in 2007 against ENDA, allowing the continued discrimination of LGBT citizens based on their sexual identity in the workplace. Through the early part of the Obama administration, he was quite the obstructionist, voting against the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, against the Hate Crimes Expansion, against Dodd-Bill Wall Street Reform, against stricter regulations on offshore drilling after the Deepwater Horizon spill, against the DREAM Act, against the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", and against the Zadroga Bill, to provide healthcare to the First Responders from 9/11, after many inhaled toxic dust and chemicals looking through the rubble for survivors after the tragedy. Since Republicans took control of the house, he voted for both attempts to defund Planned Parenthood, the great majority of attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, voted against raising the Debt Ceiling limit (which would have collapsed the global economy, and led to the United States having its credit rating reduced for the first time in its history), and also voted for the 2013 Government Shutdown. Shuster voted against funding the Department of Homeland Security in 2015, and was a co-sponsor of the American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act, an attempt to ban Syrian refugees from being resettled in the United States. Rep. Shuster returned to Washington in 2017 to start his ninth term in office (the only challenger he faced in 2016 was a Tea Party candidate who lost to him in the primary, but then re-entered the race as a “Democrat” to challenge him in the general election), and has been all over every Republican initiative in the new session, including flat-out lying about what a repeal of the Affordable Care Act would do to people with pre-existing conditions: He also added, at a later time, the brazenly false statement that Obamacare covered “24 million people fewer than it was supposed to, and the projected price tag doubled to $2 million”. Fact-checkers were all over him on this, and thankfully, and his constituents were highly suspicious of his claims. Not that those voters would get a chance to confront him about it, because Shuster dodged all of his town halls for two whole years. Just prior to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s ruling where judges threw out the gerrymander engineered by the Pennsylvania GOP, Bill Shuster saw the writing on the wall and decided to hit the “EJECT” button and abandon Congress, failing in his promise to pass a new nationwide infrastructure bill before he left office. As such, we’ll set aside his profile at this time and go ahead and take a look at a different wacky Republican today instead. (Current crazy/stupid scoreboard, is now 760-40, since this was established in July 2014.)


Jeff Hoover

Welcome to the 760th original “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profile, where today we’ll be taking a look at Jeff Hoover, the former Republican Speaker of the House in the Kentucky House of Representatives, who served as a state legislator for District 83 from 1997-2018. And, we’re not going to get into the minutiae of his voting record, but we’ll just sum it up as best we can as a hyper-conservative agenda of anti-choice, pro-gun legislation he supported and that he’d even vote against minimum wage increases during our country’s greatest period of income inequality in a century.

While we could analyze all that, it’s much more relevant to say that Jeff Hoover submitted his resignation in January of 2018 after it was revealed he didn’t just sexually harass women at the state capitol, but he would settle lawsuits from those incidents with taxpayer dollars. On a nearly daily basis, the 21 year-old staffer was sexually assaulted nearly daily by the 58-year-old Hoover, sometimes under the table in meetings at the capitol. And his obsession with her was terrifying, as reports were that he allegedly would scream at her for just talking to other men.

Hoover had the nerve to finish out his final term so he could collect a government pension that he would have lost if he resigned from office entirely. We’ll just add him to the list of scumbags exposed by the MeToo Movement, and leave him with his own tainted legacy.

[InformationGeek]

Jon is back and calling out turtle boy.

[worstblogever]

Jon is back and calling out turtle boy.

McConnell's up for re-election in 2020, and I'm going to laugh if Amy McGrath upsets him because he's so brazenly crooked and partisan at this point that he's not even trying to hide it.

[Tendrin]

McConnell's up for re-election in 2020, and I'm going to laugh if Amy McGrath upsets him because he's so brazenly crooked and partisan at this point that he's not even trying to hide it.

I think he figures he can get away with it, plus stalling electrion integrity bills sure can't hurt.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

McConnell's up for re-election in 2020, and I'm going to laugh if Amy McGrath upsets him because he's so brazenly crooked and partisan at this point that he's not even trying to hide it.

I'm not sure he's ever hidden either. He has no reason to because he figures that his re-election is in the bag. No way will Turtle Boy let himself get upset when he still has more right leaning judges to stack the courts with should Trump win a second term, and more obstruction games to play if a Democrat wins the White House.

[Gray Lensman]

I'm not sure he's ever hidden either. He has no reason to because he figures that his re-election is in the bag. No way will Turtle Boy let himself get upset when he still has more right leaning judges to stack the courts with should Trump win a second term, and more obstruction games to play if a Democrat wins the White House.

If McQuisling, Benedict Donald, or the Republican majority in the Senate are lost in 2020, expect the rules for confirming judges to change to enable every last vacancy to be filled during the lame duck session no matter what those changes need to be enable enable it. Things like no debate even being allowed will likely be on the table.