All purpose news and politics thread part v: The quickening

[JCAll]

I know celebrity opinions aren't always worth much, but this one had me shaking my head.

Meat Loaf says Greta Thunberg has been brainwashed into thinking climate change is real

Are their really just reporters following around old celebrities looking for bad takes?

[Darkspellmaster]

Are their really just reporters following around old celebrities looking for bad takes?

Yup, because it seems to be a thing right now for nostalgia. Him and other random celebrities keep being asked for their thoughts on things. It's like "Hey Gen X remember this guy? Well here's what he thinks."

Can I just say the food is better than the performer.

[shooshoomanjoe]

Stay safe Ilhan. Fake news has riled up trump's conservative terrorists against you again.

[Gray Lensman]

The day I start caring what Meatloaf thinks about anything is the day I hope to be run over by a bus.

Well, if I wanted some tips on songwriting I could do worse - he has more album sales than probably everyone in this thread combined will have in their entire lives. When it comes to climate science, I'll listen to the climate scientists, thank you very much.

And to those idiots saying not to listen to elitist experts, what do they think car mechanics, doctors, and even professional cooks are if not experts in their respective fields?

[numberthirty]

Well, if I wanted some tips on songwriting I could do worse - he has more album sales than probably everyone in this thread combined will have in their entire lives. When it comes to climate science, I'll listen to the climate scientists, thank you very much.

And to those idiots saying not to listen to elitist experts, what do they think car mechanics, doctors, and even professional cooks are if not experts in their respective fields?

Well...

We are living in a country where at least a couple of religious groups will refuse medical treatments, and another group of people don't put much stock into a doctor's take on the potential benefits of vaccine use versus what they believe might be going on.

[Tendrin]

Republican Rep. Phil Roe of Tennessee announced Friday that he will not seek reelection in 2020, instead leaving Capitol Hill after his sixth term.
“As someone who practiced medicine for over 30 years, I said I would serve five or six terms because I never intended this job to be a second career. After prayerful consideration, I have decided to retire at the end of the 116th Congress,” Roe said in a statement.

[Darkspellmaster]

Can they get out a bit faster? Please?

[JCAll]

Stay safe Ilhan. Fake news has riled up trump's conservative terrorists against you again.

The really depressing thing is that's not even the worst thing I've seen on Twitter today. That 'honor' goes the the President, of course, who is tweeting that if Iran retaliates over the assassination yesterday that he'll start bombing Iranian civilian sites. Which is just all the war crimes, just all the war crimes, announced on Twitter, like it ain't no thing. What a world...

Is there any doubt left in people's minds that the GOP is just a terrorist cell pretending to be a government?

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Can they get out a bit faster? Please?

Problem is, with moderate/mostly sane Republicans leaving the party, seemingly in droves, that leaves behind the rabidly loyal Trump Humpers who'll rubber stamp his dangerous whims while protecting his orange ass from annoying shit like the Constitution.

[Mister Mets]

Let's not pretend this has anything to do with timing. Events in Iraq have been leading up to this for over a week.
If Congress had known the length Trump was willing to go to save face they never would have approved and would've tried to stop the attack. He didn't tell anyone for that reason.

Presidents do get to make some foreign policy decisions, so there are two wrinkles to the question of whether he should have informed congress.

The first is whether the military would have lost the opportunity to strike had Trump waited to get key members of Congress just after New Years. The second session of the 116th Congress doesn't start until Tuesday, so many members are going to be out of town.

The second is whether anyone in Congress would have tried to anything to do anything to stop the mission, where secrecy is of paramount importance.

If Tump had enough time to tell Lindsey and his Mar-a-Lago crowd, he had enough time to put in a call to Congress or send Pompeo, Pence, or someone else to brief the Gang of 8.

Is there any indication he delayed the attack in any way in order to let Lindsey Graham or Mar-A-Lago randos get a heads up on the attack.

When it can literally start a war ? Yeah. You need to talk. Dudes not a random terrorist, he's a high ranking offical in a nation. If Iraq drone struck Pence people would be rightly pissed

If Iraq or Iran had killed an American tourist, we would be rightly pissed off.

[worstblogever]

Hey WBE! Get a load of this charmer!

Been there, done that.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/201...ustus-Invictus

[jetengine]

Presidents do get to make some foreign policy decisions, so there are two wrinkles to the question of whether he should have informed congress.

The first is whether the military would have lost the opportunity to strike had Trump waited to get key members of Congress just after New Years. The second session of the 116th Congress doesn't start until Tuesday, so many members are going to be out of town.

The second is whether anyone in Congress would have tried to anything to do anything to stop the mission, where secrecy is of paramount importance.

Is there any indication he delayed the attack in any way in order to let Lindsey Graham or Mar-A-Lago randos get a heads up on the attack.

If Iraq or Iran had killed an American tourist, we would be rightly pissed off.

Pissed off enough to threaten warcrimes and escalate to war footing ?

[Tami]

Presidents do get to make some foreign policy decisions, so there are two wrinkles to the question of whether he should have informed congress.

The first is whether the military would have lost the opportunity to strike had Trump waited to get key members of Congress just after New Years. The second session of the 116th Congress doesn't start until Tuesday, so many members are going to be out of town.

The second is whether anyone in Congress would have tried to anything to do anything to stop the mission, where secrecy is of paramount importance.

Is there any indication he delayed the attack in any way in order to let Lindsey Graham or Mar-A-Lago randos get a heads up on the attack.

If Iraq or Iran had killed an American tourist, we would be rightly pissed off.

It doesn't matter. It takes as much effort to phone call someone in his WH circle and tell them to get in contact with the Gang of 8, to let them know that something was going to happen, as it does to tell Lindsey. Lindsey Graham should have known that the Gang of 8 needed to be informed and he could have cut his vacation short to contact McConnell and Shumer.

Better that then keeping them in the dark.

[Mister Mets]

The problem is racism is baked into the cake for the GOP and it infects everything. You can't put sewage on a gourmet meal and say the meal is fine just because it has sewage on it.

It always seems like the GOP's spending cuts hurt some people more than others and Lee Atwater said that was the point and it still seems like the point. The GOP's voter ID laws always seemed to aimed at people who will not vote for the GOP, rather than anything impartial. What about the GOP closing polling stations in black neighborhoods, what is the non racist, non power lust reason for that?

https://www.governing.com/topics/pol...ck-voters.html

For a lot of people, racism is part of the ''moral values'' of the religious right. Look at the origins of the movement.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/st...origins-107133

You cannot deemphasize the racism problem the GOP has, it's too baked into the bones of the modern GOP to playdown and its kinda demeaning to the people this racism hurts to play it down.

Lee Atwater described the effects of spending cuts as a byproduct, not as the point.

Democrats and Republicans will generally make self-serving arguments about their policies. The non racist non power lust reason for polling station closures was cost. That was mentioned in your article several times.

Because the Voting Rights Act made it more difficult to close polling stations in areas that had a well-deserved reputation for racism generations ago as opposed to other parts of the country, there was going to be an increase in closures in those places when that element of the law was repealed. Equivalent stations in other states could be closed years earlier.

A wrinkle is that Democrats are making some race-based arguments (IE- suggesting African-American voters are less comfortable voting in majority-white neighborhoods) whereas many Republicans would prefer not mentioning race at all.

When local officials attempt to close polling places in majority-black neighborhoods, as they tried in Randolph County, Georgia, they force black voters to travel farther to vote, Rutchick said, and to vote in an environment they may find threatening, like in a majority-white neighborhood.

Indeed, Andrea Young, the executive director of the Georgia chapter of the ACLU, said poll closings often target so-called super voters, who consistently vote and depend on routine and comfort in the voting process.

Polling place environments also can have a large impact on how people vote. Sometimes the influence can be overt, such as when a location is a church or a school.

In mid-August, city officials in Medford, Massachusetts, moved a polling place from a Veterans of Foreign Wars building because of a large “All Lives Matter” sign on display at the location, which some residents claimed was racist.

The routine question is complicated since that calls for maintaining polling stations in areas where the population is declining.

As for the religious right, members of the coalition doing sketchy things in the past doesn't mean that later members think the same way or that everyone on their side thought the same way. Much of what we consider to be the religious right backed Jimmy Carter in 1976, because of the sense that the third-generation Baptist was one of them, and were disappointed in his presidency. As one example, Michelle Bachmann met her husband while they were volunteering for her campaign. That's going to complicate the story of its rise as a political coalition.

The article suggests that while Roe V. Wade's effect on motivating pro-life voters was actually rather limited, the spike in legal abortions in 1978 changed things (I do wonder how much of the perceived political impact had to do with the anti-Republican mood in the first two congressional election cycles after Watergate and Carter's facing the typical backlash in his midterms; 1974 and 1976 were going to go well for Democrats and 1978 was going to go poorly no matter what.)

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2015, 2016, 2017, as well as 2018, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day posted profiles of Lyle Rowland, a member of the Missouri House of Representatives, hailing from the Show-Me-State’s District 155 who wrote Missouri’s own “Birther Bill”, HB 283 back in 2011, and after it did not pass, he actually submitted a second one in 2012, HB 1046. The idea that President Obama is secretly not an American citizen and “stole” the 2008 and 2012 elections is not the only paranoid conspiracy theory that Rowland believes in, though, as he also submitted legislation to prevent the adaptation of environmental standards from the United Nations’ Agenda 21 treaty from 1992, with his reason for the move being a video from Glenn Beck raving like a lunatic about how it’s a secret plot for global domination. Among his “smaller government” priorities has been his need to respond to the public outcry after the killing of Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson, by taking the classy step of trying to vote for SB 199, to amend the justification for deadly force to make it EASIER for police to get away with shooting civilians, and also another vote for HB 499, a bill that would require not just all public school students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance with “under God” in it, but specifically to have to do so in English (which based on previous court rulings, is unconstitutional on multiple levels). He’s also tried to nullify federal gun laws, legalize guns in schools, and pass legislation to create unnecessary waiting periods for abortions, to round out his rap sheet. Since Rowland took office in 2010, he only once faced a primary challenger for his seat in 2016, and has never been challenged by a Democrat. After four terms in the Missouri House, he faced term limits in 2018 and had to leave office.


Warren Love

It was on this date one year ago that “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” first profiled Warren Love, a member of the Missouri House of Representatives first elected in 2016. He's pretty damned racist, as we’ll get to the bulk of why, but there was a tip-off in January of 2016 when he made a reference to a “black Negro” in a committee meeting. It didn’t get better from there.

In August of 2017, after the campaign of terror carried out by White Nationalists in Charlottesville, a push back against hatred began, with Confederate monuments around the country getting torn down, or in some instances, vandalized. Warren Love responded to the removal and vandalism by getting on Facebook and calling for those who would act against memorials to a failed rebellion carried out in the name of keeping African Americans slaves to be “hung from a tall tree”. We’ll repeat that… he called for opponents of Confederate monuments to be LYNCHED.

Now, almost immediately after that, Love was criticized from both sides of the aisle, but he tried a folksy version of the “I was taken out of context” defense:

“That was an exaggerated statement that, you know, a lot of times is used in the Western world when somebody does a crime or commits theft.... That’s just a Western term, and I’m very much a Western man.... You know, I wear a coat. You know, I dress Western. And, you know, I’m the cowboy of the Capitol.”

And then, people realized that his comments were not a one off, as Love, a member of the GOP, offered some unique thoughts in another Facebook post, about the founder of his party, Abraham Lincoln:

”Today is Lincoln’s birthday. Lincoln was the greatest despot and tyrant in American history.”

Almost every Democrat in the Missouri state legislature, and several Republicans called for Love’s resignation, and that included the governor at the time, Republican Eric Greitens, (who would come to understand resignations firsthand.) But when it came time to actually reprimand him and remove him from his committee assignments, Missouri Republicans managed to somehow look the other way, and not vote to take him to task.

We’ll note that when you look at Warren Love’s voting record, you’ll find other evidence other than his love for the Confederacy that shows he’s has his head either up his arse and/or in the 19th Century, like how he voted against a measure to prevent child marriages in Missouri, is a supporter of Personhood, as well as support for Voter ID measures that are the modern equivalent of Jim Crow legislation.

Love also voted for nullification legislation to attempt to ignore federal firearms legislation, voted for paranoid and unnecessary anti-Sharia legislation aimed at banning “foreign laws”, and voted to try and block the implementation of the United Nations’ Agenda 21 Treaty (because he’s apparently convinced it’s a plot for global domination), and he also voted for a clearly unconstitutional measure that not only would force schoolchildren to recite the Pledge of Allegiance every day, but specified that it must be spoken IN ENGLISH. Only a few months ago, he voted to ban abortion in Missouri when a fetal heartbeat is detected, which is also at 6 weeks, before many women even realize they are pregnant.

The only good news we have is that Warren Love will be term-limited in 2020. We’re hoping he chooses to not run for any higher office, and just skulks off into retirement.