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

[worstblogever]

On this date back in 2014, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" ran a profile of Rich Iott, a 2010 Tea Party Congressional candidate from Ohio, who had the fun hobby of participating in World War II reenactments, always for whatever reason, dressing up as an officer of the Nazi SS in them, which is the sort of extra-curricular activity that won’t win you any elections.

In 2015, we published our original "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" profile of Tom Smith, the owner of a coal mine who ran for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania in 2012, who was not undone by his stances on same sex marriage, climate change, or privatizing Social Security, as he was his flub during the "War on Women". That being, he was asked if he agreed with Todd Akin about "legitimate rape", and he compared it to a family member who had chosen life in a similar circumstance. That circumstance that was as bad as rape? Having a child out of wedlock. And that... really finished off Tom Smith's chances.

In both 2016, and in 2017, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” presented profiles of the former Nevada Congressman Joe Heck, who came to Washington, D.C. back in the 2010 Tea Party Wave as the U.S. House Representative for Nevada’s 3rd Congressional District, and whose career went sideways after he made an ill-advised attempt at winning a U.S. Senate seat and lost to Catherine Cortez-Masto in the 2016 elections. Now, in spite of the fact that the skunk-haired Heck is a doctor who went to medical school for eight years, he has plenty of moments where you wonder how the hell he could survive in higher education that long. Perhaps the most glaring example of Joe Heck being clueless came in May of 2016, where he agreed with a crowd of constituents that a majority of Muslims wanted to pass Sharia Law in the United States, volunteering that it had already happened in Michigan (not just false, but easily proven false). Heck also managed to embarrass himself when trying to argue about why the attack on Benghazi justified an attempt on blocking the nomination of Susan Rice to be Secretary of State in an interview with CNN’s Soledad O’Brien back in November of 2012, when she pointed out that by his logic, Condolezza Rice was already proven to be a deliberate liar, and was approved to the position by the GOP, but Susan Rice, if she lied at all, would have done so unknowingly. Somehow, though, Joe Heck found Susan Rice to be clearly worse. Wouldn’t you know it, Joe Heck is also a climate change denier, who claims that “CO2 is a natural, biological process”, and that “We’ve Seen Changes In Our Climate Both Ways, And I Think Throughout The Future Millennia We Will Continue To See Climate Change That Goes Both Ways.” The retirees counting on Social Security checks in Nevada, were probably also dismayed that Joe Heck thinks “Social Security is a pyramid scheme” and would like to get rid of it. Heck’s voting record in Congress includes support for hardline anti-choice legislation across the board, including two attempts at defunding Planned Parenthood, votes against disaster relief for victims of Hurricane Sandy, a vote for the 2013 Government Shutdown, and virtually every attempt at repealing the Affordable Care Act. There’s also the matter of Rep. Heck’s son, Joey. Apparently, a parental intervention was needed back in June 2013 after people started to notice the younger Heck had a habit of posting racist, sexist, and homophobic slurs on Twitter, including Joey’s summary during the presidential debate on October 3rd, 2012, between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, where the teen said Romney “raped” Obama in the debate and made him his “slave” before later in the conversation saying the president had achievements “yeah like spear chucking and rock skipping. The sports they do in his home country…” Well, he seems like a good kid, huh? Heck apologized and assured the public he had NO IDEA where all his son’s attitudes came from, but it sure wasn’t anything HE taught him. Joe Heck had one moment of decency towards the end of his career, when he withdrew his support of Donald Trump in 2016 after the Access Hollywood tape emerged. Unfortunately, after he lost to Catherine Cortez-Masto in the Senate race, that only made the rest of Republicans blame his lost on not defending Trump, and dig in to defend any grotesque statements he made going forward. It’s a sad legacy from a terrible politician, really.

On this date in 2018, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profiled the former State Treasurer of Ohio, Josh Mandel, who has managed to also be a two-time loser in attempts to defeat U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown for his seat in Washington, D.C. Mandel, as a state legislator, voted against a law to make cockfighting in Ohio a felony, and never gave a valid reason why. In August of 2012, Mandel embarrassed himself even further when he placed himself firmly in the category of climate change deniers, originally just whining about the mythical “war on coal”, and going as far as to say scientific research into climate change “is inconclusive and riddled with fraud.” His main strategy in trying to win office was to tell utterly outrageous lies and get blasted for it by fact-checkers. It would be one thing to say Sherrod Brown had voted for the Affordable Care Act, but that just wasn’t enough of a barb for Mandel, who decided to push the story to the fact that Brown was “the deciding vote”.And Mandel even got a “Pants on Fire” rating from Politifact when he tried claiming that somehow, Sherrod Brown was responsible for half a million jobs in Ohio being outsourced to China, which wasn’t even remotely true. So, yes, Josh Mandel lost. But don’t worry, he had the consolation prize of… a brand new car! Or… wait, he didn’t. Mandel got nailed for campaign finance fraud charge that he tried to keep a vehicle bought using campaign money, and actually tried saying that it was a positive, and proved he was a “fiscal conservative”. In 2014, Mandel won a second term as state treasurer, and was biding his time for six years to try for a bit of political revenge. Still looking like he was 39 going on 13, in 2017, he managed to hustle his way into a promotional ad with Ohio State Buckeyes football coach Urban Meyer, touting a plan to aid disabled Ohioans. Not a bad photo op if you can get it. Unless, of course, taxpayers find out that they’re the ones who paid $1.84 million to see Mandel hanging out with Meyer to promote the program, and ask where the hell most of the money really went. By mid 2017, it was official, Mandel was challenging Sen. Brown again. His 2018 efforts were somehow even worse than those he had six years prior. Because, in November of 2017, for whatever reason, after a report from the Anti-Defamation League, a proud Jewish organization dedicated to fighting back against bigotry and anti-Semitism spoke out against both Mike Cernovich and Jack Pobosiec for fomenting the “Pizzagate conspiracy” (the delusional myth that Hillary Clinton and other high-ranking Democrats were running a child sex ring out of the basement of a pizzeria that did not, in fact, even have a basement, let alone a child sex ring operating out of it)… for whatever stupid reason, Josh Mandel chose to post a defense of the Pizzagate masterminds on Twitter, and call the ADL a “partisan witchhunt group”. If that isn’t sad enough to see, it’s sadder than you think. Josh Mandel is the grandson of survivors of the Holocaust. And he chastised the ADL for holding White Nationalist conspiracy theorists accountable for their lies. And he also had the hypocrisy of defending individuals blatantly making up accusations of pedophilia by a political candidate while simultaneously also being unable to muster the courage to condemn Roy Moore when he was accused of doing the same thing by multiple women when they were teens decades prior (and not just right-wing loons making things up out of whole cloth). Early polling showed that Josh Mandel was likely to fare even worse in his November matchup with Sherrod Brown, between a Democratic Blue Wave and his latest rounds of stupidity. The loss was likely to be by double digits. A month before the candidate deadline to file for office, Mandel dropped out of the Senate race, to spend time with his wife while she was recovering from an unspecified health issue. That’s probably a better reason for leaving a race than Mandel just suffering from chronic rectal-cranial inversion, we reckon. Hopefully she recovers without incident, and her husband’s political career doesn’t. 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 770-40, since this was established in July 2014.)

[worstblogever]

Javier Manjarres

Welcome to the 770th original “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profile, where today we’ll be Javier Manjarres, who ran “The Shark Tank blog”, a conservative website, and who was a 2018 candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives for Florida’s 22nd Congressional District. Let us say now that this guy has the political acumen of someone who climbs into a shark tank after rolling around in a vat of chum first. Manjarres is a Trump supporter and Colombian immigrant who even supports the construction of the stupid-ass border wall. In 2016, he was actually charged with ATTEMPTED MURDER after he attacked his sister’s boyfriend, punching him five times in the face as he went to exit his vehicle, and then reaching for his gun. As the boyfriend drove away, Manjarres fired three shots that struck the truck. Somehow… charges were dropped, and this guy thought, “Well, now I’m Congressional material!”

Which is amazing that a guy who attempted to murder someone with a gun would run for office there. You see, Florida’s 22nd Congressional District is the home of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland Florida, and was not far removed from its student body being victimized by a mass shooting. When it occurred, the Congressman for that district, Democrat Ted Deutch immediately left the capitol, telling staffers “I’m going home.” He then comforted the survivors, and the families of the victims, and called again on smarter gun control laws in our country.

Javier Manjarres wasted no time attacking Rep. Deutch, claiming that his statement, “I’m going home” was a lie, and claiming that Deutch didn’t actually live in his district. He then accused him of being a “shameful extremist” who was “exploiting victims of the shooting for political expediency and gain”.

If you’re thinking that makes Manjarres an ***hole, you better strap in, because this actually gets worse.

One of the victims at Parkland was Jaime Guttenberg, and her father, Fred, already had battled against the NRA and its spokeswoman, Dana Loesch, on Twitter. Only five months removed from Jaime’s death, Javier Manjarres managed to get into a Twitter war with Fred Guttenberg, one of his prospective constituents, and accused HIM of “exploiting his daughter’s death in the name of some political agenda”.

“C’mon Fred. I can’t only imagine the pain you are feeling over the loss of your daughter, but stop exploiting her death in the name of some political agenda. Your daughter was shot by some lunatic who had an AR-15, not by the gun itself.”

Needless to say, that utter lack of humanity and the attempted murder were likely the reasons why Javier Manjarres failed to advance out of the GOP Primary for the seat to represent Florida’s 22nd Congressional District, only earning 34% of the vote in that race. As much as he shot his mouth off prior to the election, it seems unlikely that he could win office anywhere in Florida anytime soon.
 

[aja_christopher]

"The day after the United Nations voted to recognize the People’s Republic of China, then–California Governor Ronald Reagan phoned President Richard Nixon at the White House and vented his frustration at the delegates who had sided against the United States. “Last night, I tell you, to watch that thing on television as I did,” Reagan said.

“Yeah,” Nixon interjected.

Reagan forged ahead with his complaint: “To see those, those monkeys from those African countries—damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!”

Nixon gave a huge laugh...

These new tapes are a stark reminder of the racism that often lay behind the public rhetoric of American presidents. As I write a biography of JFK, I’ve found that this sort of racism did not animate President Kennedy—indeed, early on he took political risks to help African leaders, most notably Gamal Abdel Nasser and Kwame Nkrumah. But his reluctance to do more, sooner for African Americans cannot be separated from the paternalism he brought to the Oval Office or the prejudice held by parts of his Boston inner circle.

Kennedy, at least, learned on the job that securing civil rights for all was a moral imperative. Donald Trump, on the other hand, is a symptom of a sickness that dwells in American society, sometimes deeply and weakly, sometimes on the surface and feverishly. He bears responsibility for his own actions, but the tropes, the turns of phrase, the clumsy indirection, and worse, the gunk about American society that he and his most devoted followers pass off as ideas, have an ugly tradition.

It is not at the core of the American tradition, for what makes us mighty and successful is that we are much more than the narrowest of our minds. But it remains an ineluctable part of American culture, nonetheless.

Nixon never changed his mind about the supposed inherent inferiority of Africans. At the end of October 1971, he discussed the UN vote with his best friend, Bebe Rebozo. Bebe delighted Nixon by echoing Reagan: “That reaction on television was, it proves how they ought to be still hanging from the trees by their tails.” Nixon laughed."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...-nixon/595102/

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

"The day after the United Nations voted to recognize the People’s Republic of China, then–California Governor Ronald Reagan phoned President Richard Nixon at the White House and vented his frustration at the delegates who had sided against the United States. “Last night, I tell you, to watch that thing on television as I did,” Reagan said.

“Yeah,” Nixon interjected.

Reagan forged ahead with his complaint: “To see those, those monkeys from those African countries—damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!”

Nixon gave a huge laugh...

These new tapes are a stark reminder of the racism that often lay behind the public rhetoric of American presidents. As I write a biography of JFK, I’ve found that this sort of racism did not animate President Kennedy—indeed, early on he took political risks to help African leaders, most notably Gamal Abdel Nasser and Kwame Nkrumah. But his reluctance to do more, sooner for African Americans cannot be separated from the paternalism he brought to the Oval Office or the prejudice held by parts of his Boston inner circle.

Kennedy, at least, learned on the job that securing civil rights for all was a moral imperative. Donald Trump, on the other hand, is a symptom of a sickness that dwells in American society, sometimes deeply and weakly, sometimes on the surface and feverishly. He bears responsibility for his own actions, but the tropes, the turns of phrase, the clumsy indirection, and worse, the gunk about American society that he and his most devoted followers pass off as ideas, have an ugly tradition.

It is not at the core of the American tradition, for what makes us mighty and successful is that we are much more than the narrowest of our minds. But it remains an ineluctable part of American culture, nonetheless.

Nixon never changed his mind about the supposed inherent inferiority of Africans. At the end of October 1971, he discussed the UN vote with his best friend, Bebe Rebozo. Bebe delighted Nixon by echoing Reagan: “That reaction on television was, it proves how they ought to be still hanging from the trees by their tails.” Nixon laughed."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...-nixon/595102/

The Reagan’s were masters at making racism sound nice. This shouldn’t be surprising.

[aja_christopher]

The Reagan’s were masters at making racism sound nice. This shouldn’t be surprising.

Not at all surprising -- but some people don't believe it (or admit to it) unless they hear the tapes.

-----
"These days, though Trump’s imagery is less zoological, it is pretty much the same in spirit. And this president, unlike Nixon, doesn’t believe he needs to hide behind anyone else’s racism."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...-nixon/595102/

[jetengine]

Nixon and Reagan were both shitty

[JCAll]

This idea that it'd somehow be unfair to pay out reparations to anyone who wasn't directly enslaved is just another lie that moderates want to tell themselves in order to keep on doing nothing. The generation that was positioned to directly compensate freed slaves never even entertained the idea of doing so, and in fact saw themselves as the wronged party for being deprived of valuable assets, finding all sorts of loopholes to continue exploiting black people in ways that continue to the present day. The fact that our society will apparently never be ready to have a mature conversation on this topic is far more an indictment on our own moral failings than the policy shortcomings of reparations.

I've never thought to look, but I wouldn't be surprised to if the slave owners had been compensated by the government under some sort of eminent domain law for freeing their property.

[Kirby101]

In 1980 Reagan went to Philadelphia, Mississippi the site of the murder of 3 Civil Rights activists by local authorities, to give a speech about "State's Rights>
That is pure Southern, Confederacy racism. The "Southern Stragedy" in all it's ugliness. Yes, we knew at the time Reagan was a racist. From "Welfare Queens" to his racist cabinet members. Reagan was the beginning of the end for this Country. It turns my stomach when Democrats quote him as a good President.

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

Sanders and Warren just need to run as a ticket. They’ll take a majority share and pass Biden.

[Dalak]

Sanders and Warren just need to run as a ticket. They’ll take a majority share and pass Biden.

I can see it now "Warren-Sanders 2020" It brings a tear to my eye.

[InformationGeek]

The least racist man in the world decides to single out another person of color to ridicule and insult.

CNN’s Don Lemon, the dumbest man on television, insinuated last night while asking a debate “question” that I was a racist, when in fact I am “the least racist person in the world.” Perhaps someone should explain to Don that he is supposed to be neutral, unbiased & fair,.....

....or is he too dumb (stupid} to understand that. No wonder CNN’s ratings (MSNBC’s also) have gone down the tubes - and will stay there until they bring credibility back to the newsroom. Don’t hold your breath!

[shooshoomanjoe]

or is he too dumb (stupid} to understand that.[/URL]

Why did he put stupid in parenthesis? Does he think that people don't know what dumb means?

[Dalak]

The least racist man in the world decides to single out another person of color to ridicule and insult.

Why did he put stupid in parenthesis? Does he think that people don't know what dumb means?

He's too stupid to consistently use parenthesis, I checked the Tweet in question and it remains a } instead of ) for that stupid tweet.

[Jim Kelly]

Everyone gives Donald Trump too much attention. His political opponents most of all. You don't need to publish that Donald Trump has said he's the "least racist," because he's said it on multiple occasions. He has a habit of saying and tweeting the exact same phrases, so they become associated with his name. If you google "least racist," guess who comes up. If you really wanted to hurt Trump, you would starve him of attention and only give it on the rare occasion when he does something worthy of praise. That's how you train a dog, that's how you raise a well-behaved baby.

[Darkspellmaster]

Honest question here, when talking about Reparations are people including them for other groups too, or is this strictly for the African American community?

Question 2: what about the people that dont want money? Like the one man that argued that in the long run it's not something he thinks will help. Do they get an option to refuse the offer given to them?

Curious about this as I agree with it, but are we also going to ask for payment from Spain and France and other European nations that assisted in the slave trade, or are they off the hook?

Can we instead have a Warren Harris ticket?

How far out is Castro and Buttigieg in regard to the polls?