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

[Gray Lensman]

I like Warren but I think she will sink the election like past candidates perceived to be too liberal, like George McGovern and Mike Dukakis. Both landslide losses. We need all the Democrats and all the fence sitters to vote against Trump

The conundrum with her is that the electorate doesn't want a restoration of politics as usual. They want a fundamental shift in the overall system rather than the status quo of slowly sinking under the water. Someone like Biden may encourage a lot of people who would rather vote for Sanders or Warren to vote for Trump. The racists can't be reached, but there are also the people who the "the system is slowly killing me, so a vote for the establishment is a vote for suicide. Trump is almost certain death too, but he provides a sliver of hope the status quo does not." I don't agree, but there are plenty of people like that out there. And Warren has something that Sanders and Trump don't - the ability to rally the Democrats AND the ability to explain to red state voters what her plans do for them. That second ability makes her truly dangerous in the general, and Wall Street rallying behind Trump might actually be to her benefit with those voters.

[Michael Watkins]

Unless something changes, currently it's either Bullseye Biden with a target on his back, or War on Wallstreet Warren.

Warren's farther to the left. so that's who i'm backing. and i hope she's every bit as liberal as they accused a corporatist like Obama of being. why should i settle for a centrist when the other side is going full xenophobe?

[Tami]

Warren's farther to the left. so that's who i'm backing. and i hope she's every bit as liberal as they accused a corporatist like Obama of being. why should i settle for a centrist when the other side is going full xenophobe?

I can vote for either, though I do like Warren better.

[Gray Lensman]

I can vote for either, though I do like Warren better.

I'm having a hard time thinking of anyone who'd be so bad that I'd vote for Trump to keep them out. Maybe the reincarnation of Osama Bin Laden?

[Michael Watkins]

I'm having a hard time thinking of anyone who'd be so bad that I'd vote for Trump to keep them out. Maybe the reincarnation of Osama Bin Laden?

if he's reincarnated, he's basically starting with a fresh slate. i'd have to know his thoughts on medicare for all though.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, as well as 2018, "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.

In 2016, Rep. King compared Syrian refugees to “poisoned grapes”, ranted about the Obama administration’s LGBTQ 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.

After King was re-elected to an eighth term in office in the 2016 elections, his opponent, Democrat Kim Weaver, planned 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]

Just a sampling of Steve King's worst moments since 2017:

• 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”.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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”.
• January 11th, 2019: Rep. King wonders out loud, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive? Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?”
• March 21st, 2019: King disaparages survivors of Hurricane Katrina, saying, “I saw that from the air and from the ground and went back and did what we could to help those folks down there. But here’s what FEMA tells me: ‘We go to a place like New Orleans and everybody’s looking around saying, who’s gonna help me, who’s gonna help me?’ They’re just always gratified when they come and see Iowans take care of each other, so that’s a point of pride that spreads across the country.”
• August 14th, 2019: Steve King, unprompted, starts discussing what he feels are the merits of rape and incest:
  
  

  "What if we went back through all the family trees and just pulled those people out that were products of rape and incest? Would there be any population of the world left if we did that?Considering all the wars and all the rapes and pillages taken place and whatever happened to culture after society? I know I can't certify that I'm not a part of a product of that."

• August 27th, 2019: King laughs when talking about how he heard the Chinese government forces detained Muslims to break the tenets of their religion and feed them only pork.

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 Democrat opponent in 2020 is a rematch with J.D. Scholten, a former minor-league baseball player with the Sioux City Explorers turned attorney whose roots in Iowa go back five generations. King barely held him off in 2018, and before he faces in him 2020, will have to survive a GOP Primary challenger. Steve King’s fundraising is currently almost nil, and his constituency seems so disgusted with him that only one person turned up at his last town hall last month.



All signs are pointing towards the obvious… Steve King has been a bigot to an extent that even in a Republican held district… his days in Congress might be numbered in fourteen months.

[Tami]

I'm having a hard time thinking of anyone who'd be so bad that I'd vote for Trump to keep them out. Maybe the reincarnation of Osama Bin Laden?

I still don't like Sanders, so that would be a nose holder for me. But even he's better than Trump.

[KOSLOX]

On this date in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, as well as 2018, "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.

In 2016, Rep. King compared Syrian refugees to “poisoned grapes”, ranted about the Obama administration’s LGBTQ 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.

After King was re-elected to an eighth term in office in the 2016 elections, his opponent, Democrat Kim Weaver, planned 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.

Eh, I don't know if I'd say that... meaning sure he'll send your kids to war, but he himself got three college deferments and then dropped out once he was no longer in danger of having to actually go to war.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

I'm having a hard time thinking of anyone who'd be so bad that I'd vote for Trump to keep them out. Maybe the reincarnation of Osama Bin Laden?

When it comes to Wall Street fat cats determined to protect their wealth, they’d vote for Hitler if he came back to life.

[Iron Maiden]

I'm having a hard time thinking of anyone who'd be so bad that I'd vote for Trump to keep them out.

Me Too. But with Warren, I can see Trump drumming up the old "Pochantas" stuff. You never know what effect that kind of thing can have.

[Tami]

Trump is already making implied threats against the Whistleblower and anyone who may have helped him or her, anyone who gave the Whistleblower information about the phone calls.

Trump threatens US officials who gave information to the Ukraine case whistleblower

In a private meeting with US staffers at the United Nations on Thursday, President Donald Trump ranted about the “spies” within his administration who gave information to the whistleblower in the Ukraine case and mused about punishing them the way “we used to do in the old days” — seemingly alluding to the practice of executing spies for treason.

“Basically, that person never saw the report, never saw the call, he never saw the call — heard something and decided that he or she, or whoever the hell they saw — they’re almost a spy,” Trump reportedly told the staffers, referring to the whistleblower. “I want to know who’s the person, who’s the person who gave the whistleblower the information? Because that’s close to a spy.”

“You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? The spies and treason, we used to handle it a little differently than we do now,” he continued.

[jetengine]

All Wallstreets statements show is that they need more regulation and money needs to be removed from politics.

[Theleviathan]

The whistle-blower complaint correctly summarizes the phone transcript.

Can't make the line any clearer than that.

IMO, without their names and testimony I don't know how this goes to impeachment. The fact that it summarizes the transcript should be the grounds to push for full transparency, but until that happens I think he has room to get off on this.

Pinning him to trying to cover it up would be pretty damn helpful too.

[worstblogever]

Trump threatens US officials who gave information to the Ukraine case whistleblower

One of the other big revelations from today's hearing...

The acting DNI, Dan Maguire, could not verify if Rudy Giuliani has a security clearance.

Which, if Giuliani can prove the State Department had him acting as an emissary in Ukraine without one... holy s***.