All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[Tami]

Someone threatens Bugs and repeatedly gets made into a fool.

Daffy Duck gets chumped.

ACME products backfire on Wile E Coyote yet again.

Sylvester fails to eat Tweety, fails to learn lesson as well.

Pretty much all the classic WB cartoons had a plot you could figure out the moment you saw the cast of the episode.

The humor was not in the plot but in the set-up.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Toyota Defends Donating To Republicans Who Refused To Certify 2020 Election

The automaker’s terrible excuse sparked calls for a boycott. Distressing. I'll never look at Jan the same way again.

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DOJ Sues Georgia, Says GOP-Backed Restrictions Unlawfully Target Black Voters

The Justice Department has made its first move against one of the voting laws passed in the wake of Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. DOJ should sue EVERY state that's passed similar laws.

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Kristi Noem Uses GOP Donor’s ‘Private Donation’ For Guard Deployment To Texas

The South Dakota governor and 2024 presidential hopeful says the troops are necessary to protect the southern border from migrants trying to enter the country. Sure, they are.

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Letter Warned Of Collapsed Miami Building’s Problems Months Ago

“A lot of this work could have been done or planned for in years gone by. But this is where we are now,” the condominium board president wrote.

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GOP’s Long Race To 2024 Begins

For now, a central question in Republican politics is whether Donald Trump, who continues to advance lies about his loss last year to Joe Biden, will run again. If Trump is still breathing, then the answer is yes.

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NSA Says It’s Not Spying On Tucker Carlson Or Trying To Take Down His Show

The Fox News host alleged on-air that the Biden administration was spying on him. How's that old saying go: You're not paranoid if they're really out to get you?

[Mister Mets]

The administration of the Democratic primary in New York City is a mess.

There was some griping earlier about how it was taking a while to get official results because of the system of Ranked Choice Voting, which requires every vote to be in before the process can begin. I get the complaints, but I don't think it's worth it to compromise on voter access in order to find out immediately who will be the nominee in an election in November to take over as mayor on New Year's.

Initial results showed Brooklyn borough president Eric Adams with a comfortable ten point lead. However, it seemed that the ranked choice system really benefitted Kathryn Garcia, former sanitation commissioner.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021...confusion.html

On Tuesday, the next mayor of New York City was revealed to be: Are You Fucking Kidding Me?

One week after Election Day, the city’s Board of Elections released preliminary results of the ranked-choice primary votes for mayor and it showed that Kathryn Garcia had significantly closed the gap with Eric Adams in the Democratic primary. Adams maintained a tight two-point lead over Garcia after 11 rounds of balloting, while Maya Wiley, who came in second place on election night, would be eliminated in the 10th round.

That was a remarkable twist in its own right. Later in the evening though, the Board of Elections tweeted a mysterious message about a “discrepancy” and took down the newly posted vote totals, replacing them with a notice that (presumably correct) results would be published “starting June 30.”

In a word, chaos.

As of late Tuesday evening, it was unclear whether the briefly posted tallies were directionally accurate. But they showed Adams’s final lead was less than 16,000 votes. A margin that small would be likely to shift over the coming weeks as more than 124,000 absentee ballots are left to be counted and — to say the least — many questions remain.

The preliminary tallies were announced on the same day that the absentee ballots needed to be received by the BOE, leading to widespread confusion even among campaign insiders who thought that the BOE’s announcement of the RCV results meant that Adams was the winner, full stop. In the temporarily posted results, not only was Adams not the winner, but Wiley, who was listed as “eliminated” in the final round on the BOE’s website, was seemingly very much in the mix.

The now-vanished results showed Garcia pushing past Wiley into the final round by grabbing 45 percent of Andrew Yang’s voters after he was eliminated. Yang and Garcia joined forces in the race’s final weekend, barnstorming through his strongholds in Flushing and in hers in Manhattan. While Garcia remained circumspect about who she was voting for as her number two, Yang enthusiastically pushed his voters to rank Garcia just behind him. Wiley’s vote went to Garcia over Adams by a nearly three-to-one margin.

The problem, it seems, is that the Board of Elections included 135,000 test ballots in the released data.

https://tinyurl.com/8anha3fk

The New York City mayor’s race plunged into chaos on Tuesday night when the city Board of Elections released a new tally of votes in the Democratic mayoral primary, and then removed the tabulations from its website after citing a “discrepancy.”

The results released earlier in the day had suggested that the race between Eric Adams and his two closest rivals had tightened significantly.

But just a few hours after releasing the preliminary results, the elections board issued a cryptic tweet revealing a “discrepancy” in the report, saying that it was working with its “technical staff to identify where the discrepancy occurred.”

By Tuesday evening, the tabulations had been taken down, replaced by a new advisory that the ranked-choice results would be available “starting on June 30.”

Then, around 10:30 p.m., the board finally released a statement, explaining that it had failed to remove sample ballot images used to test its ranked-choice voting software. When the board ran the program, it counted “both test and election night results, producing approximately 135,000 additional records,” the statement said. The ranked-choice numbers, it said, would be tabulated again.

The extraordinary sequence of events seeded further confusion about the outcome, and threw the closely watched contest into a new period of uncertainty at a consequential moment for the city.

For the Board of Elections, which has long been plagued by dysfunction and nepotism, this was its first try at implementing ranked-choice voting on a citywide scale. Skeptics had expressed doubts about the board’s ability to pull off the process, though it is used successfully in other cities.

Under ranked-choice voting, voters can list up to five candidates on their ballots in preferential order. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of first-choice votes in the first round, the winner is decided by a process of elimination: As the lower-polling candidates are eliminated, their votes are reallocated to whichever candidate those voters ranked next, and the process continues until there is a winner.

The Board of Elections released preliminary, unofficial ranked-choice tabulations on Tuesday afternoon, showing that Mr. Adams — who had held a significant advantage on primary night — was narrowly ahead of Kathryn Garcia in the ballots cast in person during early voting or on Primary Day. Maya D. Wiley, who came in second place in the initial vote count, was close behind in third place. The board then took down the results and disclosed the discrepancy.

The results may well be scrambled again: Even after the Board of Elections sorts through the preliminary tally, it must count around 124,000 Democratic absentee ballots. Once they are tabulated, the board will take the new total that includes them and run a new set of ranked-choice elimination rounds, with a final result not expected until mid-July.

[The Cool Thatguy]

Yeah, the Taliban will absolutely own that country again in a decade or less. But that's not our problem, and never should have been in the first place. Bin Laden and Al Qaeda should have been the focus, not nation building or regime change. Certainly not either in Iraq. We're long overdue to be gone from that part of the world.

Agreed.

Not to sound racist/ethnocentric or whatever, but the locals had plenty of time to fortify against the return of the Taliban. God knows we gave them enough blood and treasure.

[CSTowle]

Nothing racist about it, while we owe them a debt that can never be repaid (not for what they did for us, but for what we took) for bombing their country and going to war with their former government for not obeying the Bush Administration's commands there's really not much we can do that we haven't done already, aside from reimburse them for the damage we did (which will never happen) and make sure anyone who ever helped us in our war there and wants to move here gets to do so.

[worstblogever]

In 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, as well as 2020, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" published profiles of the U.S. Senator from Missouri, Roy Blunt, a man who somehow not only survived being caught up in the Abramoff scandal back when he was a member of the House, but went on to be elected to the Senate in spite of also doing favors for the tobacco industry while being caught dating Abigail Perlman (now Abigail Blunt), a lobbyist for Phillip Morris.

Since, the Blunt family have still been repeated subjects of investigation of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, who have noted lobbying firms have a habit of hiring Blunt’s wife and two children and corresponding votes to reward this arrangement from Sen. Blunt. But Roy Blunt is most famous for his namesake, the Blunt Amendment, which was an attempt to strip women of having contraception covered by their insurance plans that led to the Congressional testimony of Sandra Fluke, the insults lobbed at her by legendary bloviating ***hole (and friend of Blunt’s) Rush Limbaugh, and the entire framing of the “War on Women” around the 2012 election. In 2013, Blunt also wrote what many critics described as the “Monsanto Protection Act” to allow the corporate agriculture company to plant seeds even if they were deemed genetically or biologically unsafe (and of course, Blunt has also received contributions from Monsanto). We also sifted through Blunt’s voting record, which included voting for the 2013 Government Shutdown while voting against LGBT rights at every opportunity, the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act, Disaster Relief for victims of Hurricane Sandy, all measures on pay equality and raising the minimum wage, and against Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform (coincidentally, in 1999, Blunt voted to deregulate Wall Street to have a hand in creating the 2008 financial meltdown). Sen. Blunt is the man who used the excuse, "I can barely schedule a call with my son's math teacher yesterday so probably no,” as to why he was opposed to Merrick Garland having a confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court. He’s too busy for this whole Senate thing. But let us not forget that Roy Blunt would like to lay the blame for our student debt crisis where it belongs… on the students. Yes, back in April of 2015, Blunt blamed high student debt on “higher living standards” that college students were enjoying these days. I’m sure it was news to all the kids in college out there living off ramen noodles that they’re splurging too much while they’re in school.

And somehow, don’t ask us how, Roy Blunt won re-election in 2016, but only garnered 49% of the vote to do so.

That may have had a lot to do with Blunt stoking the fears of Islamophobia by blaming Muslim communities for not doing enough to inform the government about terror suspects that Blunt feels are lying among their ranks, or when he got on Twitter and posted that his opponent, Democrat Jason Kander, didn’t know enough about threats we face like “radical Islam”. (NOTE: Jason Kander is an Iraq War vet and actually fought against Islamic terrorists, so…) Thus, Roy Blunt went back to Washington in January 2017 and began signing off on every member of Trump’s Cabinet of Horrors. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE.

And while pausing on approving Betsy DeVos since she… you know, has never worked as an educator, that might have been the case for some moderate GOP Senators, Roy Blunt was ready to rubber stamp her from the start. After all, DeVos spent a fortune on trying to get Roy Blunt’s son Matt elected Governor of Missouri a couple years earlier, in the hopes that her bogus voucher schools would become widely used in education throughout the state. To say nothing of all of the money DeVos gave to Sen. Blunt himself. He approved every Trump nominee, no matter how unqualified, no matter how much scandal in their personal background, and every judge, no matter how obviously non-partisan they are. Blunt voted to approve the nomination of William Barr to be the country’s Attorney General, even though he was involved in the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s. He voted against witnesses being allowed in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, then voted to quit him in the Senate in spite of the mountain of evidence showing that he solicited foreign assistance in the 2020 elections.

Roy Blunt still is a fine champion of women’s rights, if you live on Bizarro World. In 2017, he dug in and refused to call for the resignation of Missouri Governor Eric Greitens, who was not only embroiled in a case where he was accused of sexual assault and extortion with a mistress… but Eric Greitens was also simultaneously being investigated for breaking campaign finance law and a variety of other ethics charges. On February 25th, 2020: Blunt voted for the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, an insane piece of anti-choice legislation that would ask abortion providers to try to admit aborted fetuses to a hospital if they were “alive” after the procedure, which is medically impossible given the age that abortions can be performed at.

We’ll note that since the election in November, it took all of a week before Roy Blunt started playing along with Donald Trump’s Big Lie, and refusing to acknowledge Joe Biden would be the 46th president, telling reporters:

”The President wasn't defeated by huge numbers -- in fact, he may not have been defeated at all.”

Through December, Sen. Blunt was still trying to avoid saying that Biden had won:

”Well, the president-elect will be the president-elect when the electors vote for him. There is no official job president-elect.”

So of course, a seditious dips*** this dedicated to what ended up causing the violent coup attempt carried out by Trump supporters on January 6th that he was a vote as a part of Senate Republicans’ filibuster to try to create a non-partisan investigation into the causes of the attack, and hold those responsible accountable. Y’know, like him, for contributing to the lies.

Blunt has been crooked as a snake with scoliosis, and we were relieved to hear he will retire in 2022 and be leaving office, likely to focus on trying to make his son into a political legacy (Please no).

[The Cool Thatguy]

Nothing racist about it, while we owe them a debt that can never be repaid (not for what they did for us, but for what we took) for bombing their country and going to war with their former government for not obeying the Bush Administration's commands there's really not much we can do that we haven't done already, aside from reimburse them for the damage we did (which will never happen) and make sure anyone who ever helped us in our war there and wants to move here gets to do so.

Yeah, agree. Minor addition to my statement, we owe our translators a ****-ton and should be making every effort to protect them.

The rest, they should have used the time they had to shore up their democratic institutions

[Mister Mets]

CSpan has done a survey of historians of presidential leadership to rank Presidents.

https://www.c-span.org/presidentsurvey2021/

The top ten...
10. Barack Obama
9. Ronald Reagan
8. John F Kennedy
7. Thomas Jefferson
6. Harry Truman
5. Dwight Eisenhower
4. Theodore Roosevelt
3. FDR
2. George Washington
1. Abraham Lincoln

Donald Trump is fourth from the bottom, rated higher than Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan.

All the presidents are rated in the categories of Public Persuasion, Crisis Leadership, Economic Management, Moral Authority, International Relations, Administrative Skills, Relations with Congress, Vision / Setting an Agenda, Pursued Equal Justice For All and Performance Within Context of Times

I'm sure everyone here will find different things to disagree on. JFK seems really overrated.

[Zauriel]

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021...he-senate.html

Is Herschel Walker running for senate against Raphael Warnock?

He is one of the few black celebrities that still support the Orange boy. There's an old photo of Trump and Herschel shaking hands in Trump's autobiography "art of the Deal".

Herschel's son Christian is pro-police, and anti-BLM activist. If you haven't read his tweets, you should.

[Kirby101]

I love JFK and think he would have been a great 2 term President. But as far as leadership, LBJ did far more. Though he probably lost out because of Veitnam.
Reagan is problematic here, especially in the Pursued Equal Justice for All category. And hie Economic record is pretty bad.

[godisawesome]

I love JFK and think he would have been a great 2 term President. But as far as leadership, LBJ did far more. Though he probably lost out because of Veitnam.
Reagan is problematic here, especially in the Pursued Equal Justice for All category. And hie Economic record is pretty bad.

I think JFK’s legacy, and the way LBJ successfully used it to pass Civil Rights legislation, gives him a boost that may or may not be fair. LBJ was a better legislative cowboy, both before and during his presidency, but he likely wouldn’t have been able to hammer down so hard on segregation voting rights if JFK hadn’t died and supplied LBJ the goodwill to wield as a hammer when his more surgical and dirty methods wouldn’t cut it. It kind of let JFK’s rep absorb most of LBJ’s impressive achievements.

And I think that as time goes on, the Bay of Pigs failing to cause JFK anything like the headache Vietnam caused LBJ likely helped bolster historians’ idea of JFK as a Cold War pragmatist, even as it bled over into the Cuban Missle Crisis - that JFK had enough sense to take his foot off the gas petal and snub some of his generals where LBJ exploded an already dubious military action into an era-defining political crisis.

Lincoln getting the top spot makes the most sense, though. Studying him politically in the Civil War is an amazing analysis of both incredibly expansive Presidential powers *and* incredible restraint and canniness about when to hold back. Considering his context, arguably his greatest political mistake was making Andrew Johnson his Vice President, and then only because Lincoln was assassinated - making the political goodwill gesture of finding a Southern Democrat for a running mate is a great bit of PR that likely *did* play a part in consolidating the Union’s support for the war, but AJ was one oft he worst politicians to place into a post-Lincoln presidency.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

I love JFK and think he would have been a great 2 term President. But as far as leadership, LBJ did far more. Though he probably lost out because of Veitnam.
Reagan is problematic here, especially in the Pursued Equal Justice for All category. And hie Economic record is pretty bad.

If Vietnam hadn't escalated like it had, perhaps LBJ might've run for a second term. Who knows. As for Reagan, let's not forget his administration initially refused to take the AIDS epidemic seriously during the early years when the disease ran rampant. Then there was the whole Iran-Contra business, and the question that Saint Ronnie might have been in the beginning stages of Alzheimer's during his second term. In my opinion, he has no business ranking that high.

[Kirby101]

If Vietnam hadn't escalated like it had, perhaps LBJ might've run for a second term. Who knows. As for Reagan, let's not forget his administration initially refused to take the AIDS epidemic seriously during the early years when the disease ran rampant. Then there was the whole Iran-Contra business, and the question that Saint Ronnie might have been in the beginning stages of Alzheimer's during his second term. In my opinion, he has no business ranking that high.

Not to mention the S&L crisis, exploding the deficit for a failed economic policy, destroying unions, and starting us on the wealth inequity we see today.

[Scott Taylor]

Interesting list. Most of them have big "moments" in history:

10. Barack Obama - Bringing us out of economic crisis
9. Ronald Reagan - Fall of the wall
8. John F Kennedy - Cuban missile crisis
7. Thomas Jefferson - Formation of the Marines
6. Harry Truman - ended WWII
5. Dwight Eisenhower - Not sure. Kind of set the economic pace for the next 50 years in history
4. Theodore Roosevelt - Conservation movement
3. FDR - Bringing us out of economic crisis
2. George Washington - First President. Wrote farewell address, which is so amazingly good its crazy.
1. Abraham Lincoln - Civil War

Wonder what the top 10 most infamous presidents would look like.

[godisawesome]

Interesting list. Most of them have big "moments" in history:

10. Barack Obama - Bringing us out of economic crisis
9. Ronald Reagan - Fall of the wall
8. John F Kennedy - Cuban missile crisis
7. Thomas Jefferson - Formation of the Marines
6. Harry Truman - ended WWII
5. Dwight Eisenhower - Not sure. Kind of set the economic pace for the next 50 years in history
4. Theodore Roosevelt - Conservation movement
3. FDR - Bringing us out of economic crisis
2. George Washington - First President. Wrote farewell address, which is so amazingly good its crazy.
1. Abraham Lincoln - Civil War

Wonder what the top 10 most infamous presidents would look like.

Well, infamous? Or incompetent? Those would have pretty different meanings.

James K. Polk and Andrew Jackson were both competent enough to be close to supervillains, but not bumbles. On the other hand, there pre-Civil War presidents are mostly painfully inadequate non-entities who didn’t do anything.