All purpose news and politics thread part v: The quickening

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

Biden continues to be the safest bet to beat Trump, with a lead twice as big as Sanderseses:



... and that is from the poll that gave Sanders his biggest primary lead yet, so they definitely did not undersample Sanders supporters.

3 points is generally regarded as the margin of error for polls. So realistically they are all in the ballpark

[Tami]

Corporations are working with the Trump administration to control online speech

Ron Wyden, a Democrat, represents Oregon in the U.S. Senate.

Some of the biggest corporations in the United States are brawling over the future of the law that allows free speech and innovation to thrive online. Under the guise of getting rid of lies and protecting children, they’re working with the Trump administration and top Republicans to undermine Americans’ rights and give the government unprecedented control over online speech.

Special interests trying to influence federal laws and regulations are nothing new in Washington. Big banks and drug companies have been wildly successful at working the system to discourage competition and stay on top. Occasionally, however, Congress actually passes a law that protects the less powerful elements of our society, the insurgents and the disrupters. That’s what it did in 1996 when it passed a law I co-authored called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

Section 230 was written to provide legal protection to online platforms so they could take down objectionable material without being dragged into court. It lets companies remove posts from white supremacists or trolls without being sued for bias or for limiting individuals’ First Amendment rights. If a website wants to cater to the right wing, it can. If it wants to ban Trump supporters, it can do that, too.

Section 230 also says the person who creates content is the one responsible for it. So if President Trump libels an innocent person on Twitter, he can be sued. Without 230, social media couldn’t exist. Sites such as Yelp would be sued to death. Start-ups such as Portland’s AllGo, which collects user reviews about how restaurants serve plus-size customers, would never get off the ground. Movements such as Black Lives Matter or #MeToo, whose advocates post controversial accusations against powerful figures on social media, would have remained whispers, not megaphones for oppressed communities.

The fight is defined by an intensive lobbying effort by big legacy corporations such as Disney and IBM that are looking for an advantage against big tech companies such as Google and Facebook. Each side wants to rewrite the rules to cement its own dominance.

[Theleviathan]

3 points is generally regarded as the margin of error for polls. So realistically they are all in the ballpark

Right and with the turnout Trump had in New Hampshire...none of them should feel good about their margin in that poll.

[PaulBullion]

Right and with the turnout Trump had in New Hampshire...none of them should feel good about their margin in that poll.

4 of the 5 most recent polls like that had Biden doing best, one had Sanders one point better than Biden. Unlikely that the trend is in error: Biden is still the front runner by the measure of who can best defeat Trump.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

The post-impeachment revenge tour continues....

Trump suggests he may sue over Mueller investigation

President Trump on Tuesday suggested he may file lawsuits over the outcome of former special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, saying its findings are "badly tainted."

The president in a series of tweets also made multiple misleading claims about Mueller and his investigation as he again lashed out over the trial of longtime associate Roger Stone, who is scheduled to be sentenced this week in a case stemming from the former special counsel's probe.

"Everything having to do with this fraudulent investigation is badly tainted and, in my opinion, should be thrown out," Trump tweeted.

"The whole deal was a total SCAM. If I wasn't President, I'd be suing everyone all over the place," he added. "BUT MAYBE I STILL WILL. WITCH HUNT!"

[Mister Mets]

As someone who grew up in northern MA, that’s not very accurate. NH shares most of its media with MA and many of its residents are just MA transplants who moved north for cheaper costs of living. For a lot of them they just live in NH and commute to MA. Boston is still the central business hub of that area. Vermont is like Maine to them. It’s a nice small rural state that is nice to vacation to but isn’t as prevalent in their lives.

Kerry was the last MA politician before Warren to run a primary in a MA. He got 72% of the fire had it wasn’t remotely close

Don't forget Romney's second place in 2008 and first place in 2012 among Republicans.

[worstblogever]

Got a hat trick to make up for lost time...



On this date in 2015, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" ran a profile of Ian Bayne, a failed candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives for Illinois’ 11th Congressional District in the 2014 elections. Bayne was a long shot from the start, but his odds went to the level of unlikely of navigating the Millenium Falcon through an asteroid field after he came rushing to the defense of Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson after Robinson gave his now infamous screed against the gay community in GQ magazine. Because Bayne not only commended Robertson, he compared him to Civil Rights icon Rosa Parks for what he said. Maybe that sort of conservative trolling would help a guy get elected in Mississippi, but not Illinois.



In 2016, 2017, 2018, as well as in 2019, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" published its profiles of Kansas State Senator Mary Pilcher-Cook, who served eight years in the Kansas House of Representatives during the Bush administration but came to our attention back in February 2015 when she introduced a bill, SB 56, which would have amended Kansas’ public morals statute by deleting an exemption that protects K-12 public, private and parochial schoolteachers from being prosecuted for presenting material deemed harmful to minors, focusing, but not limited to sex education classes. In other words, any book could result in the arrest, prosecution, and possibly jailing of teachers and librarians, if “deemed harmful to minors”. She produced this legislation after supposedly receiving a single angry letter from a parent whose child’s sex education class had a poster that acknowledged that some people try oral or anal sex. Well, nothing says “party of smaller government” like going the full Mrs. Lovejoy and trying to ban books, and arrest teachers that don’t play ball and accommodate the supposed morality you feel the need to push on everyone, eh? Intelligent people pointed out that Pilcher-Cook’s bright idea would also ban reading to students that featured any discussion of “harmful” content, but she didn’t back down, and was still threatening teachers with jail for teaching sex education. Mary Pilcher-Cook is a special, elite kind of social conservative. She once voted to place restrictions on any and all “adult entertainment" in the state, opposes the exceptions for rape and incest to exist for abortion, referring to them as “political hijinks”, wanted to pass a law to force women to report their miscarriages to the authorities, has tried to criminalize surrogate parenting (on the factually incorrect basis that those parents are "creating a child purposely that you know is not going to have a biological mother") and once had the Public Health and Awareness Committee host a meeting where they got to witness a live sonogram in the state legislature to try to justify a mandatory ultrasounds for abortions bill. And she scheduled it on the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade ruling. She compares the use of long-term birth control to eugenics, in an astounding leap of logic.

Sadly, even with Kansas starting to push back against Republicans in the state legislature for being, quite frankly, complete hyper-conservative idijts, Pilcher-Cook managed to narrowly win re-election in 2016 with 51% of the vote over Vicki Hiatt. This in spite of the fact that her own colleagues booted her off of the Senate Health and Public Committee, while she was serving as Chairwoman, because she tried to add an amendment to an unrelated bill to try and act against the Affordable Care Act, and prevent the Medicaid Expansion in Kansas. She still is doggedly obsessed with restricting abortion rights, as evidenced by a bill she co-sponsored in 2017, that would require all women seeking an abortion to be given a pamphlet that MUST have all its information to try and talk them out of getting one presented in 12 point Times New Roman font, because that’s the GOP brand of “smaller government” at work right there.

Pilcher-Cook has spent this term in office impotently rambling about her objections to cities and communities approving LGBTQ protections in Kansas, taking out opinion editorials in local papers where she tries claiming that since you can’t truly define “sexual orientation” or “sexual identity”, you shouldn’t be able to consider it a protected status in the courts (Supreme Court kind of already has done so, Mary, in several instances). Oh, and she’s co-sponsoring resolutions within the Kansas State Senate to condemn pornography, which is probably any book that isn’t the Bible or Little House on the Prairie, in her mind, and claiming that is causes “infidelity and erectile dysfunction”. (Last time we checked, porn has made far more boners than it's killed.)

While Mary Pilcher-Cook was up for re-election in 2020, she abruptly announced she was resigning in January of 2020, in between Christmas and New Year’s. We’re not sure of the reason, but we’re not going to complain that she’s out of office, and would like to offer our finest “GOOD RIDDANCE” salute.

[PaulBullion]

The post-impeachment revenge tour continues....

Trump suggests he may sue over Mueller investigation

There is a certain Streisand effect about Trump's inability to change the subject from his impeachment.

[PaulBullion]

Or, as never-Trumper Republican Rick Wilson puts it:

TRUMP: I’m going to sue the Deep State coup plotters.

LAWYERS FOR DEEP STATE COUP PLOTTERS: Sure, and we get to depose you. We have a list of 900 questions. Oh, and we want to depose everyone related to your Adminstration, transition team, campaign, and businesses.

TRUMP:

[AnakinFlair]

The post-impeachment revenge tour continues....

Trump suggests he may sue over Mueller investigation

I hope he does. I can't wait until the discovery phase, when Donnie Demented would be forced to turn over all the incriminating evidence needed to fully validate the report.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, as well as 2019, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day posted profiles of Arkansas State Senator Jason Rapert, serving District 35 there. We noted in our profiles that while Rapert is a member of the Holy Ghost Ministry that does missionary work in Ghana and Uganda, the darker side of that group is that it has pushed for Uganda’s draconian laws to criminalize homosexuality with a death sentence, and Rapert himself has praised Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni for the attempt purge on Uganda’s LGBT citizens. However, that’s not his only theocratic action… Jason Rapert has also tried passing bans on same sex marriage in Arkansas, as well as tried to pass an unconstitutional ban on abortion as early as when a fetal heartbeat is detected, at 12 weeks, and uses the Book of John to justify dropping nuclear weapons on all of Iraq and Syria to rid us of the “barbarians” in the region, while lamenting that the United States can’t be more like Saudi Arabia and handle gays more harshly. Rapert has also outed himself as a Birther, complaining about “minorities running the country” and suggested that President Obama had committed treason by allowing Ebola victims to be treated inside the United States under quarantine. His legislative stances also include support for Voter ID, drug testing welfare recipients, and putting concealed firearms in both churches and on college campuses. Rapert also declared war on Wikipedia in the past few years, publicly declaring any and all negative stories in the media listed against him as “false and libelous”, and responded to a constituent meeting him in public and asking him by policy by refusing to answer to a “smartypants” like them and fleeing in his truck. Rapert then got on social media and posted a vague threat for no constituent to ever approach him again, threatening, “Not smart to come up and harass somebody in a parking lot who’s carrying a handgun. Better be glad you decided to walk away.”

Ah, good democracy, where our elected leaders answer to simple questions from the populace by threatening to put a bullet in them. Wonderful. That’s exactly the sort of lesson I’m sure Holy Ghost Ministries has taught him to express fine Christian values. Speaking of that, you really have to wonder considering after all Jesus spoke about being kind to refugees (and growing up as one, himself), how Jason Rapert could ignore that message and call for all Muslims from being banned entry into the United States in November 2015. He justified that reaction by falsely claiming Islam calls for the death of anyone who refuses to be converted to their religion. Oh, but Rapert also voted for Arkansas’ HB 1228, their own “religious freedom law” to allow for his fellow Christians to legally discriminate against LGBT citizens, and chalk it up to their faith telling them to be intolerant, and their deeply held beliefs supposedly cannot be violated.

And Rapert’s still an all-around bigot, as he proved when he called for the removal of a black Arkansas judge who disagreed with the judge working on the Tamir Rice case, who felt that charges were not necessary against the law enforcement that gunned him down in two seconds. Rapert insisted Judge Wendell Griffin was not just writing “racially motivated hatred and anti-law enforcement remarks”, but imagined somehow that his comments were also “inappropriate sexual references” that he imagined where in Griffin’s comments. Of course, Rapert’s grudge with Griffin goes back some time, asking the church to also strip the judge of his title as a minister, and when former Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel weighed in to defend Griffin, Jason Rapert made the level-headed decision to tell McDonald he is an “abortion pimp”. He also has gone on Facebook and advocated for using nuclear weapons against the Islamic State. Sure, there are only a few thousand of those Jihadists left, and it's not like millions wouldn't also die in the fallout if we just nuked them, right? Or that the multiple countries like Syria and Iraq that they're operating in, or their allies wouldn't be pissed at us for that?

Look, we've pretty well established that Jason Rapert is a fanatical ***hole in our previous posts about him. But just when you think you've seen the worst he has to offer, he proves you wrong. Rapert was at the 2016 RNC to support Donald Trump, because of course he was. And Jason Rapert was really mad at the "Never Trump" Republicans present, who were rallying behind Sen. Ted Cruz for refusing to endorse Trump. And so it was that Jason Rapert clashed with future CSGOPOTD Lori Saine, accusing her of not being a "good Christian" because she would not support Trump. We repeat, he attacked her for not being a "good Christian" because she would not support a racist, sexist, thrice married billionaire willing to have affairs with porn stars, boasts about committing sexual assault, denies feeling the need to ask God for forgiveness for anything, lies about his charitable giving, covets wealth above all else and has not just appeared on the cover of pornographic magazines, but in multiple pornographic films. But hey, Trump having an affair? No big deal. But Bill Clinton having an affair? That’s SERIOUS BUSINESS to Jason Rapert, who wasted the public’s time and money when he filed legislation in Arkansas aimed at renaming the Little Rock airport after anything that isn’t the former president, and citing his affair as the reason why.

That isn’t even the craziest thing Jason Rapert has done since we started profiling him. Over the summer of 2017, he got on the bandwagon started by notable GOP pedophile Roy Moore, and had a monument of the Ten Commandments built in the state capitol. The ACLU filed a lawsuit to have it removed, but it wasn’t even up for 24 hours when a man with a history of mental illness turned up to crash into it and destroy it anyway. And then, who could have predicted that Rapert’s religious monument would have opened the door for the Satanic Temple to make the case for their own statue of Baphomet to be displayed alongside the Ten Commandments one. Maybe because it’s exactly the same thing that happened when Fundamentalist Republicans tried the same stupid thing in Oklahoma only a few years ago.

Jason Rapert’s attacks upon his own constituents’ access to him have also escalated, as in October, he became the target of lawsuits for banning atheists he represents on Twitter for having the nerve to remind him there’s a separation of church and state. (And based on recent legal rulings regarding Donald Trump trying to block his critics, they probably have a good case to win.) Which seems to be only one social media battle that Rapert is losing, considering in December of 2018 the Council for American-Islamic Relations have called for his censure based on social media posts he made, and only days later, Twitter took notice, and temporarily suspended his account for his flagrant bigotry. (And that’s no small feat.)

In 2019, he began trying to fight a lawsuit filed by the Church of Satan to block the testimony he made in his defense of his Ten Commandments monument, because he’s apparently embarrassed of how stupid he looks in open court. Also, it’s hilarious that he’s the latest Republican being foiled by the Church of Satan over the separation of church and state.

Arkansas’ District 35 might could have avoided re-electing Rapert to a third term in office in 2018 but chose instead to keep this fanatic around for another four years to watch him try and pass unconstitutional laws that will cost the state a small fortune in easily lost lawsuits. We at least can be relieved that he will not be re-elected to the state legislature in 2022, but we’re afraid we have to report he’s planning to run for lieutenant governor in two years’ time.

Just… great. GREAT. He’s running for higher office…

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Or, as never-Trumper Republican Rick Wilson puts it:

I hope he does. I can't wait until the discovery phase, when Donnie Demented would be forced to turn over all the incriminating evidence needed to fully validate the report.

I'm guessing Dolt45 never thought that far ahead. Once his lawyers, including his consigliere, Droopy Dawg Barr lay down the facts and the trouble he'd face by filing a suit, that threat of his will die down real quick.

[kidfresh512]

I'm guessing Dolt45 never thought that far ahead. Once his lawyers, including his consigliere, Droopy Dawg Barr lay down the facts and the trouble he'd face by filing a suit, that threat of his will die down real quick.

Its all hot air. Its easier to just get Barr and his personal law firm the DOJ to keep meddling in all the cases that came from the investigation. And hand out pardons

[Tami]

Trump expected to grant clemency to former Ill. Gov. Rod Blagojevich, ex-NYPD commissioner Bernard Kerik

President Donald Trump is expected to grant clemency to former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who was impeached and removed from office in 2009 on corruption charges, and to former New York police commissioner Bernard Kerik, two people familiar with the president's plans said Tuesday.

The news comes hours after Trump signed an executive order granting a full pardon to former San Francisco 49ers owner Eddie DeBartolo Jr. related to a decades-old corruption charge.

Blagojevich, 63, was sentenced in 2011 to 14 years in federal prison on corruption charges related to his solicitation of bribes in an attempt to "sell" the Senate seat Barack Obama left open after being elected president.

Kerik was sentenced in 2010 to four years in prison after pleading guilty to eight felony charges, including tax fraud.

Why not just swing open the prison gates and let everyone out?

[AnakinFlair]

It looks like Judge Amy Berman Jackson will consider the motion for a new trial of Roger Stone. I wonder if she'll do that, knowing if there is a new trial, it may stretch out beyond the new election, and if Trump is defeated and Stone is found guilty again, sentencing wouldn't happen until next year. It may be cynical to think that, but the Judge obviously knows that Trump will end up pardoning the son of a bitch, and maybe she wants to make sure he actually faces justice.