All purpose news and politics thread part v: The quickening

[Rosa Luxemburg]

Just a reminder that Bill Maher is trash.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/bill-m...ils?ref=scroll

As the article points out, Maher said Milo's transphobia was reasonable.

He's a bigoted *******, through and through.

[Tendrin]

As the article points out, Maher said Milo's transphobia was reasonable.

He's a bigoted *******, through and through.

Ayep. His bigotry towards trans people and Muslims alone should've had him off the air years ago were 'cancel culture' a real thing, but hey, 'even liberal Bill Maher agrees...' is a thing I hear from conservatives entirely too often.

[SquirrelMan]

Honestly I’d rather keep the Senators in the Senate and quite frankly, you don’t want a pick that will turn off her base. So Booker, Harris, Kllbuchae, Bennet, Swalwell, and Bullock are a no.

Maybe Yang. Buttiegieg is another possibility. I think Beto could be a strong choice there, if he delivers Texas you win and he’s young and has shown a fire recently.

He wrote "maybe yang."

[WestPhillyPunisher]

A Guide To Republicans' Flailing Defenses Of The Trump-Ukraine Scandal

Without a coherent response from the White House, Trump’s supporters have been wildly pinballing across a range of unconvincing arguments. Anything, and I do mean ANYTHING to avoid getting on Trump's bad side.

**********

Donald Trump Has Chosen His Own Political Survival Over Gun Control Measures

The president has made it clear that his priority is getting reelected, even if it means more Americans getting slaughtered by guns. Show of hands if you're surprised. Anyone?

**********

Trump Keeps Picking Unqualified People To Be Lifetime Judges. Republicans Don’t Care.

The GOP has already confirmed five judicial nominees rated “not qualified” by the American Bar Association, and more are coming. Great! The ONLY qualification that matters is loyalty to Trump, the Republican Party and right wing/conservative causes, in that order. Mission accomplished!

**********

National Security Council’s Alexander Vindman Told To Keep Quiet About Trump Call: Reports

The Ukraine expert reportedly testified that the NSC’s top legal adviser told him not to share his concerns with anyone. Hmmm! I wonder why? Could the reason be the call was a bad move on Trump's part and people in his inner circle knew it?

**********

Don Lemon Warns: Donald Trump ‘May Be Stronger Than You Think’

The CNN host broke down the week’s developments in the impeachment inquiry.

[Tami]

‘It’s like nothing we have come across before’: UK intelligence officials shaken by Trump administration’s requests for help with counter-impeachment inquiry

As the impeachment hearings get more and more alarming for Donald Trump, with damning new evidence emerging every day, there appears to be increasing urgency in the parallel counteroffensives under way by the president’s team in an attempt to defend him.

There are attacks against the witnesses giving testimony by Trump and his supporters, including attempts to smear Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, Ukraine expert at the National Security Council who this week provided crucial testimony about Trump’s telephone call to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. And there have been the extraordinary scenes of congress Republicans breaking into the proceedings and disrupting them.

At the same time, overshadowed by the publicity around the impeachment, is the ever-broadening investigation by William Barr, the attorney general, which the White House sees as a game-changer. An investigation which is seeking nothing less than to overturn the conclusion of the US intelligence services and special counsel Robert Mueller that Russia interfered in the last US presidential election.

The UK, in particular, has been viewed by Trump followers, especially far-right conspiracy theorists, as a deep source of woes for the president.

The claims that Trump was the Muscovian candidate for the White House effectively began to take shape after a meeting in May 2016 between Alexander Downer, the then Australian high commissioner in London, and George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy advisor for the Trump campaign, at a bar, the Kensington Wine Rooms in west London.

Trump loyalist Nunes, who his hometown newspaper in California has called “Trump’s stooge”, had to step down at one stage over allegations that he was colluding with the White House during the House investigation. He had, in the past, tried to carry out his own “Barr-Lite” version of investigating the investigators.

In August 2016, two staffers from the Nunes-run House Intelligence Committee suddenly turned up from the US at the London office of Steele’s company, Orbis. Not finding him there, they went to the office of his lawyer and demanded to see him.

The timing of the visit was of importance. Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee, carrying out separate Russia investigations, were making progress in their attempts to speak to the former MI6 officer. The two men had come with the aim, it was suspected, of intimidating Steele. Nothing discernible appears to have resulted from their trip.

[Tami]

Donald Trump is getting ready to make a run for it and take his business with him - tell me that this doesn't make you wonder about that

Trump Administration Scaling Back Rules Meant to Stop Corporate Inversions

WASHINGTON — The Treasury Department said on Thursday that it was rolling back regulations issued under the Obama administration that were enacted to prevent American companies from moving their official residence abroad to reduce their tax bills.

The regulations are no longer necessary, Trump administration officials say, because of changes made in the tax overhaul that President Trump signed in 2017. The changes reduced taxes on American companies and included provisions meant to discourage these so-called inversions. In an inversion, an American company merges with a foreign firm and becomes its subsidiary, effectively moving its headquarters abroad for tax purposes.

The previous regulations, issued over the course of President Barack Obama’s second term, were credited by many tax analysts with reducing inversions. Business groups criticized the regulations, and the United States Chamber of Commerce sued to block one set of the rules, calling them “unauthorized and unlawful.”

Democrats criticized the move.

“The corporations that got a massive taxpayer handout are getting another gift from Donald Trump,” Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Finance Committee, said in a statement. “The Obama administration had essentially shut down inversions — transactions whose only purpose is to help big multinational corporations move overseas to avoid paying taxes. Weakening these rules only provides an opening for corporations to again dodge their taxes.”

The 2017 law reduced the corporate income tax rate in the United States to 21 percent from a high of 35 percent. It included provisions meant to discourage companies from shifting profits, headquarters designations or actual economic activity overseas to minimize their tax bills.

[Tami]

More veterans are getting cancer, and some suspect it's due to burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan

Lloyd Blair joined the Marine Corps as an 18-year-old itching for a fight after hijacked planes rocketed into the World Trade Center towers and set the world on fire. He pulled two tours in Iraq. The first landed him in the hell of Fallujah where some of the bloodiest fighting took place.

He didn't give a second thought to the smoke billowing from the burn pits where the military torched its own trash, not until he was diagnosed with testicular cancer after he came home.

Cancer doesn't run in his family, said Blair, who lives in Lee's Summit. So he was confused about why the cancer that befell Lance Armstrong had found him. Looking for answers online, he came across hundreds of other worried veterans with the same diagnosis.

A McClatchy investigation of cancer among veterans during nearly two decades of war shows a significant increase in cancer cases —like Blair's — treated by the Department of Veterans Affairs health care system.

The review, based on VA health care data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, found the rate of treatments for urinary cancers — which include bladder, kidney and ureter cancers — increased 61 percent from fiscal year 2000 to fiscal year 2018.

[Tami]

Trump administration to allow adoption agencies to discriminate against LGBTQ people

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) proposed a new rule today that would allow adoption and foster agencies to discriminate against LGBTQ people. Today is also the start of National Adoption Month.

The rule would apply to adoption and foster care agencies, allowing them to refuse to work with LGBTQ families. But it would go much further and allow any organization that gets an HHS grant for a health care or child care program to refuse to serve LGBTQ people, even though they are getting federal taxpayer money.

Currently, HHS rules ban giving grants to organizations that discriminate based on a list of factors. According to a notice posted on HHS’s website, a proposed rule would remove sexual orientation, gender identity, and religion from that list and allow grant recipients to treat same-sex marriages differently from different-sex marriages.

The change most notably impacts religious foster and adoption agencies. Earlier this year, HHS waived its anti-discrimination rules for a South Carolina foster agency that didn’t want to place children with families that didn’t meet the organization’s religious standards.

“It is outrageous that the Trump administration would mark the start of National Adoption Month by announcing a rule to further limit the pool of loving homes available to America’s 440,000 foster children,” said Julie Kruse of Family Equality. “The American public overwhelmingly opposes allowing taxpayer-funded adoption and foster care agencies to turn away qualified parents simply because they are in a same-sex relationship.”

[Tami]

George Soros: ‘Brexit hurts both sides – my money was used to educate the British public’

Around three decades ago, George Soros was introduced to a brash property magnate over dinner at a country house in the Catskills, upstate New York. Donald Trump was about to launch a New York office block, and he asked Soros to be his lead tenant. Soros was already a spectacularly successful financier, but told Trump he simply couldn’t afford it. “And that was just because I didn’t like him,” he tells me, smiling.

It’s not hard to see why Soros took such an instant dislike. Worldly, bookish, curious and somewhat shy, he tends to find other businessmen boring. He is unimpressed by celebrity, preferring the company of intellectuals, journalists and anyone he feels knows more about a given subject than he does. As a hedge fund manager, he was more likely to spend his free time reading and writing philosophy texts than hanging out on the golf course. If you had to conjure up a personality that is the polar opposite of the current president of the United States, it would look a lot like Soros.

We meet on a sunny October morning in the office of his New York residence, with views over the Central Park reservoir. It could easily be the consulting room of an upmarket psychotherapist rather than the headquarters of one of the world’s richest people – and, as both his critics and supporters would argue, one of the most influential. A few pieces of understated art decorate the cream-coloured walls; there are bookshelves lined with nonfiction and an air purifier hums quietly in the background. Unlike Trump Tower, just a couple of miles away down Fifth Avenue, there are no gold elevators here.

These days, the distance between Trump and Soros is about much more than personality and aesthetics. The president has become the most powerful among a global chorus of rightwing critics focused on Soros’s philanthropic efforts, which fund a broad range of causes they dislike, from minority rights and protecting refugees to liberalising drug policy and combating hate speech. Soros has long had enemies – largely, authoritarian leaders who were wary of his efforts to promote and protect democracy; more recently, this has been amplified by the antisemitic conspiracy theories that ooze from the darker corners of the internet.

Now I sit opposite a somewhat frail, elderly man wearing a maroon cardigan, and it feels like a Wizard Of Oz moment. Is this really the power-broker feared by the world’s nationalists? Soros turns 90 next year, and his face is creased with age, a distinctive banana-shaped fold of skin under each eye. He has lost much of his hearing, and visitors are given a microphone that connects directly to his hearing aid. He speaks hesitantly, often needing a few seconds to find the right word, and there is a hint of annoyance in his eyes during the pauses – as if the brain is irritated at the mouth for not articulating its thoughts fast enough. But appearances can be deceptive: Soros still maintains a busy work and travel schedule, splitting his weeks between Manhattan and upstate New York with his third wife Tamiko, and spending several months a year on the road.

What sustains him, I ask, particularly given the recent intensity of the attacks he has faced? “It challenges me and therefore it energises me,” he says with a smile, in his still-strong Hungarian accent. “When I look at the list of people, or movements, or countries who are attacking me, it makes me feel I must be doing something right. I’m proud of the enemies I have.”

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, as well as 2018, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day posted profiles of U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a man the general public finds to have the most inexplicable desire to punch in the face upon gazing upon his visage, that after hearing him speak, makes them only wish they'd gone with that instinct. Sen. Cruz is one of the most willfully repugnant heels in the GOP these days, who revels in causing outrage among those on the left, as if it’s a form of sustenance he needs to survive day to day. Ted Cruz (a.k.a. Rafael Cruz) has not only inherited an uncanny likeness to legendary “Red Scare” perpetrator Sen. Joe McCarthy, he has also adopted his tactics, making baseless claims to demonize anyone to the left of his far, far right agenda while sneering through media interviews where he plays the victim of a “vast liberal media conspiracy” when he’s called out for being a total douchebag (Cruz actually accused the moderator of the third GOP Primary debate of liberal bias for asking him a question he didn't want to answer about the debt ceiling). It’s hard to pick any one single moment as Cruz’s potential lowest point in politics as in 2016, among his most revolting moments included when he advocated for U.S. surveillance of Muslim communities to "patrol and secure" practitioners of Islam, when he sat down for an interview with the leader of the anti-gay hate group, the Family Research Council, Tony Perkins, and spread lies about how transgendered people are sexually assaulting women in public bathrooms, when he blamed Democrats for not caring enough about violence against the LGBTQ community after the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, and called a witness to testify in Congress who immediately accused our two Muslim Congressmen, Keith Ellison and Andre Carson, of being secret members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Sen. Cruz was the driving force behind the 2013 Government Shutdown, and then was shocked when his GOP colleagues held him accountable for it when it quickly proved a failed endeavor. Even though opinion polls have shown that the more people who learn Ted Cruz exists, the more people polled also develop an unfavorable view of him, he decided to make a run for the White House in 2016, only avoiding being the biggest racist, sexist troll of the bunch because Donald Trump was in the mix. Ted Cruz once filibustered for 21 hours straight in Congress (which he ignorantly compared to the Bataan death march), and by “filibuster” I mean “talks ad nauseum while no other Congressional business was scheduled”. The highlight of that speech was perhaps when he misinterpreted the meaning behind the classic children’s book “Green Eggs and Ham” in regards to the Affordable Care Act, and interpreted to be about someone who was justifiably stubborn, rather than a tale of someone who should be open to new things. Without irony, he called himself a "modern day Galileo" for his brave stance in denying climate change AGAINST all science and reason, which is precisely the opposite of what Galileo did back during the Renaissance. Cruz single-handedly held up government aid to fix the lead-contaminated water system in Flint, Michigan for no particular reason except that he’s a d***.

Cruz is such a callous prick that he actually stated joking about Vice President Joe Biden while he was grieving over the loss of his son, Beau, and was not speaking publicly, and when news broke that former President Jimmy Carter was battling brain cancer, Cruz took it as a cue to bash his one term in office at the Iowa State Fair to garner Republican Primary votes. He considers the Supreme Court's rulings on same sex marriage "the very definition of tyranny". He has tried proving his manliness by placing raw bacon on the barrel of a machine gun, firing it repeatedly so it would get hot, and then eat it. Ted Cruz is a man whose honest goal is to see he U.S. Senate filled with himself and 99 other people just like his hero, legendary Senator and unapologetic segregationalist Jesse Helms. He is, in short, the most unlikable bastard in Washington, D.C. at the moment, to the extent that his own party has stalwarts like Sen. John McCain who referred to him as a “whacko bird”, a term that Cruz takes as a compliment and former House Speaker John Boehner calls Ted Cruz to "Lucifer in the Flesh".

Seriously, everyone hates Ted Cruz, down to his own family, as evidenced by the above animated gif of his daughter recoiling in horror at the thought of getting a kiss from him, and the unedited, raw footage of his family awkwardly trying to come up with nice things to say about him during his presidential campaign. Before his campaign was over, he elbowed his own wife in the face, and decided to make a last-ditch effort to catch up to Donald Trump by naming a vice-presidential candidate on his ticket to help him get more support with Republican women... Carly Fiorina... who proceeded to fall off the stage when she was introduced at one of his rallies.

[worstblogever]

The oddest thing about the 2016 GOP Presidential Primary was that somehow, Donald Trump proved himself to be enough of a raging ***hole that we almost... ALMOST felt bad for Ted Cruz. If there was ever a metaphor for Cruz being overshadowed by Trump, it was probably when he was literally speaking out against the sentient rancid tangerine at the RNC, and Trump's plane buzzed his speech. I mean, when he got called "Lyin' Ted", we didn't blink, because Ted Cruz is a prolific liar. But when Trump started outright clowning him and called his wife Heidi ugly, or accused Sen. Cruz's father of being an accomplice in the assassination of JFK... Well, that was brutal. And it made it easy to understand why Ted Cruz went out on the third night of the Republican National Convention, and refused to endorse Trump.

It was a stance most could agree with, not just because of Trump's utter ignorance and unfitness for office... but that he personally had besmirched Cruz's loved ones. Maybe for the first time ever, people nodded in approval for Ted Cruz for being a human being for once. Cruz promised he would not endorse Trump like a "servile puppy". But no, Ted Cruz isn't just a puppy, he's a little b**** of one, and came crawling back to endorse Donald Trump and actually phone bank for him about ten weeks later. He caved, and was broken. He has voted for every horrible member of Trump’s “Cabinet of Horrors” as well as the GOP’s Senate attempt to try and repeal the Affordable Care Act that would have left 23 million people without health insurance and gutted funding from Medicaid.

Cruz spent 2017 trying to stabilize his flagging polling numbers in the build up to the 2018 election by continuing to pal around with members of Anti-Islamic hate groups, and show up and speak at their conferences. Well, that and he was trying to raise money by, y’know, sending out fundraising letters that lie and claim Planned Parenthood is using government dollars to perform abortions and that “millions of babies are being killed in the womb”. He has championed people with views or backgrounds as revolting as Brett Kavanaugh and Alex Jones in the past few years. He tried to smarm-splain Star Wars to Mark friggin’ Hamill, of all people, to gain credibility, getting none.

That doesn’t seem at all desperate, does it? What could be even more desperate? Well, how about seeing Ted Cruz have to seek out a campaign visit from Donald Trump, a man who still won’t take back accusing Cruz’s father of taking part in the assassination of JFK. We can’t help but laugh, but seriously, Ted Cruz can’t look cool no matter what he tries. He can’t even successfully post a Facebook Live video without f***ing it up. Beto O’Rourke ran circles around him in their 2018 debate, perhaps the saddest moment being when Sen. Cruz was stumped into silence for a full six seconds when asked to discuss something… anything that has nothing to do with politics that would give Texans an insight into who he is as a person.

Cruz pulled out of a town hall debate against him on CNN, effectively giving Beto a full hour of very relatable TV time to himself as a result. Beto O’Rourke was seriously living rent free in Ted Cruz’s head, as evidenced by the photo of Cruz looking pathetic and staring at a photo of O’Rourke while sitting on a plane sure makes it look that way. and then how his attempts to use photos of O’Rourke in a band in college where he wore a dress backfired, as others posted pictures of Ted Cruz in college, dressed up as a mime. Cruz has been heckled out of restaurants in Washington, D.C.

In 2019, after his re-election by a narrow margin to a second term in the Senate, Ted Cruz has continued to be human garbage. It wasn’t just that in June of 2019, that he came to the defense of a conservative pundit who was under fire for harassing a journalist from Vox with homophobic slurs (interesting battle you picked there, Ted)… In September of 2019, he tried arguing against gun control by blaming violence in Chicago (and getting its new mayor to tell him to cram it in his cramhole), then he tried to take a smarmy cheap shot on Twitter at Beto O’Rourke after his answer on climate change in the Democratic Primary debate, only to get ratio’ed and have most of the public mock him for his cluelessness on climate. when word came that Brett Kavanaugh had ANOTHER accusation of sexual assault leveled against him, Cruz responded that people “need to let the anger go”, as if it’s wrong to be ANGRY ABOUT A SERIAL SEXUAL PREDATOR ON THE SUPREME COURT.

But never forget that Ted Cruz is a repugnant, holier-than-thou Evangelical who will try and distract from say, the impeachment of Donald Trump, to be utterly repugnant, and refer to a 7 year old boy receiving hormone blockers to undergo gender conversion therapy as “child abuse”.


Seriously, the Senate GOP has a full rogues gallery of motherf***ers, but Ted Cruz is somehow still perhaps the most loathsome guy in there (and that’s saying something). His most flattering quality really is that he resembles the Zodiac Killer. We’re serious.

[Iron Maiden]

Trump administration to allow adoption agencies to discriminate against LGBTQ people

Seems like a flurry of activity just in case Trump doesn't make that second term.

[Mecegirl]

Ayep. His bigotry towards trans people and Muslims alone should've had him off the air years ago were 'cancel culture' a real thing, but hey, 'even liberal Bill Maher agrees...' is a thing I hear from conservatives entirely too often.

Truth! Who even is his audience?

[Mecegirl]

Seems like a flurry of activity just in case Trump doesn't make that second term.

The next president is gonna have a hell of a job putting **** back together after this.

[Tendrin]

Truth! Who even is his audience?

Militant atheists, folks who like to think of themselves as liberal but who have otherwise reactionary social politics, conservatives...