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

[scourge]

Musk is under the illusion he can bully Cook who, by the way, is gay, so he’s not about to put up with hate speech on a social media platform he hardly needs to bolster Apple’s bottom line.

And Musk thinks he can make his own smartphone too and is threatening Cook with that so I don't see it going well for the pathetic manchild Musk is.

[Tami]

And Musk thinks he can make his own smartphone too and is threatening Cook with that so I don't see it going well for the pathetic manchild Musk is.

Here is a list of all of the companies that manufacture Smartphones

Musk would have to come up with something really unique to even make a dent in that competitive marketplace. Really dumb to threaten Apple with something like that.

[scourge]

Here is a list of all of the companies that manufacture Smartphones

Musk would have to come up with something really unique to even make a dent in that competitive marketplace. Really dumb to threaten Apple with something like that.

And I'm guessing that's the tip of the iceberg when it comes to things that would make a Musk-rat made phone unlikely to even register on Apple's radar.

[CaptainEurope]

Here is a list of all of the companies that manufacture Smartphones

Musk would have to come up with something really unique to even make a dent in that competitive marketplace. Really dumb to threaten Apple with something like that.

And going by what his robot and the "cybertruck" look like, his phone would probably end up being this:

[SUPERECWFAN1]

Remember how we said that there would be Republicans in some power who would refuse election results , angry the GOP lost. Well here we go in Arizona...

https://news.yahoo.com/arizona-count...051442144.html

[CaptainEurope]

Virginia Democratic congressman Don McEachin, who just won reelection in the midterms, died from his long-time cancer afflictian.
There will be a special election at some point this year.

[Tendrin]

Remember how we said that there would be Republicans in some power who would refuse election results , angry the GOP lost. Well here we go in Arizona...

https://news.yahoo.com/arizona-count...051442144.html

Don't worry. I'm sure someone will be along to tell us how this isn't *really* an indictment of the broader Republican party in any way. Also, something something open borders and crime or something.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2014, "Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day" ran a profile of of Adam Kwasman, who had just recently lost his 2014 bid to be elected to U.S. Congress to represent Arizona’s 1st District. That may have not have had as much to do with Kwasman’s opposition to the Affordable Care Act, which he calls a “monstrosity”, or his distaste for healthcare spanning as far as wanting to get rid of Medicaid, as well. No, what actually seemed to badly damage Kwasman’s candidacy was when he heard there was a bus of migrant children from Central America moving through his district, and joined a crowd of xenophobic anti-immigration protesters to scream epithets at the bus, then bragged about seeing the terrified looks on the children’s faces, as if that’s heroic. This attempt to paint himself as the toughest man in the GOP Primary field against illegal immigration backfired, though, when the local news had to tell him that the bus he screamed at with his rabid pals was actually filled with children who were U.S. citizens headed to YMCA camp. This spectacularly embarrassing gaffe sent Adam Kwasman into a political tail spin that he never pulled out of, and it looks like he won’t be taking a second shot at running for Congress in the 2016 elections.

On this date in 2015, we published our original "Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day" profile of Richard Mack, a former Arizona Navajo County Sheriff who has twice tried to be elected to Congress, once in Arizona in 2006, and once in Texas in 2012. Sheriff Mack, as it seems, has been riding the fame and credibility he received from groups like the National Rifle Association for being one of the plaintiffs in the 1997 Supreme Court battle against the Brady Bill back in the 1990s to become one of the leading voices of armed right-wing militias, the John Birch Society, and white nationalist groups throughout the country. Mack is also a Birther who has appeared on Alex Jones’ Alt-Right show, InfoWars, where he has claimed that the Oklahoma City bombing was a “false flag” attack carried out by the government. During the standoff between militia groups and the Bureau of Land Management on the ranch owned by noteworthy tax scofflaw and budding domestic terrorist Cliven Bundy, Mack compared him to Civil Rights icon Rosa Parks and was one of the more noteworthy people at the scene, encouraging the Oathkeepers to hide behind women being used as human shields so that the Bureau of Land Management would have to shoot them first if they opened fire. Mack has not simply gone away, mounting a 2016 run for sheriff of Navajo County, where he hoped to establish a “constitutional haven” while speaking at length to several right-wing media outlets throughout the spring of 2015 to warn them of the threat of Jade Helm 15, threatening to arrest former IRS employee Lois Lerner if she came to his county( even though she’s not been indicted or charged with a crime), has suggested Arizona and other states “nullify” federal income tax, called for law enforcement and county commissioners to refuse to recognize the Supreme Court’s ruling on gay marriage (ironic for a “Constitutional Sheriff” to ignore the body that decides what’s constitutional, isn’t it?), and appeared at an event with Stuart Rhodes, the head of the Oath Keepers, where Rhodes called for the public hanging of Arizona Sen. John McCain. Luckily, Richard Mack dropped out of the race in 2016, and had a lunatic proxy take his place on the ballot instead. In 2018, he actually tried running for Congress again, this time in Arizona’s 8th Congressional District, and finished in a distant eighth in the GOP Primary for that seat while getting only 1.4% of the vote. That may have been because Mack decided to comment on the survivors of the Parkland shooting by noting that in his mind, the kids sounded like “Hitler” to him. (Ah yes. Lord knows we could hear the thick German accent on Emma Gonzalez. Get bent, Mack, and keep losing.)

On this date in 2016, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” published a profile about Dawn Wilson, a private investigator and candidate for Arizona Navajo County Sheriff as Richard Mack’s proxy on the ballot in the 2016 elections. Dawn Wilson wanted everyone to know during the primary elections for the sheriff’s seat in Navajo County that if she won, Richard Mack was going to serve with her as her Undersheriff. And Dawn Wilson, it seems, was not ignorant of Sheriff Mack’s background, at all, and actually wanted to enact his plan for a “constitutional county”, and to have Navajo County, Arizona, set up barriers and act outside the jurisdiction of the federal government. In a radio interview, she offered to “train our officers on the Constitution, train our citizens to know their rights, and then I want to build a barrier between the citizens of Navajo County and the federal government to keep them out. They don’t need to be coming into our county and harassing us, they don’t need to be calling for gun control. The sheriff needs to stand up and put their foot down and say, ‘No, it’s not going to happen here.’” And, mercifully, the residents of Navajo County avoided this armed rebellion against the federal government when Dawn Wilson lost in the primary, but here’s the scary part… she still got 38% of the vote in the Republican Primary, running on that platform.

[CaptainEurope]

We have a confession.

FirrkufWAAAfijt.jpg

[CaptainEurope]

A Republican political strategist was convicted of illegally helping a Russian businessman contribute to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016.

Jesse Benton, 44, was pardoned by Trump in 2020 for a different campaign finance crime, months before he was indicted again on six counts related to facilitating an illegal foreign campaign donation. He was found guilty Thursday on all six counts.

...
Benton began his career on the GOP’s libertarian fringe as an aide to former congressman Ron Paul (R-Tex.), whose granddaughter is Benton’s wife. He gained mainstream credibility helping Paul’s son, Rand Paul (R-Ky.), win a Senate seat in 2010 and was hired by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) 2014 reelection campaign.

Only the best people.

[worstblogever]

On this date in both 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, as well as 2021, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profiled Arizona State Senator Sonny Borrelli, who as a member of the Arizona House of Representatives from 2013-2017, established quite clearly that he does not get along with any Republicans unless they are as rabidly conservative as he is. Remember when this blog profiled former Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, the lady who claimed that illegal immigrants were leaving the bodies of decapitated murder victims in Arizona’s deserts? She seemed like she was an insane conservative, right? Well, Borrelli was in the state legislature when Jan Brewer made a rare good call as a governor, and decided Arizona shouldn’t block the Medicaid expansion because why turn down all the federal money that the state could use? His response was to join the lawsuit of three dozen Republican officials against Gov. Brewer to try and prevent Arizona from expanding Medicaid (and full disclosure, the Arizona Supreme Court just tossed out that lawsuit earlier in the week). It wasn’t just Jan Brewer that Sonny Borrelli would go on quixotic endeavors to battle, he also voted for a bill to try and prevent Arizona from enforcing the Affordable Care Act (you can’t nullify federal legislation, Sonny), as well as the fact that he co-sponsored a deranged bill to make gold and silver legal tender in Arizona.

But alas, this sort of arch-conservative mentality is not an outlier for Arizona Republicans. So what brought Sonny Borrelli to our attention? Well, there’s the fact that he was arrested on domestic violence charges back in 2001 for repeatedly punching his wife at the time. Still, in spite of just being lucky to have won one election, Borrelli decided to make a move at winning a seat on the Arizona State Senate in 2016, challenging Ron Gould in Arizona’s District 5. Well, not so much the challenge, but that Borrelli was caught on tape calling anyone who would back Gould a “(expletive)sucking idiot”:

“If these ignorant, (expletive)sucking idiots want to vote for that (expletive)ing phony, lying piece of (expletive), they can get what they deserve. Another f***ing senator, a senator that did absolutely nothing for this district except piss everybody off in Phoenix, to include the f***ing governor. And now how is he going to act when he goes back to Phoenix with a f***ing governor that he’s already called a (expletive)ing RINO and a liberal?”

Now, while it’s not shocking to imagine this is how politicians might feel about their opponents in an election, they probably don’t want it going public.

And yet… in spite of being a lunatic wife-beater who curses like a sailor, Borrelli defeated Gould in that GOP Primary with 53% of the vote. Democrats did not enter a candidate in the general election, and thus, Sonny Borrelli became a state senator.

Thus, he’s been able to use his new place in the state government to sponsor legislation to redefine “rioting” as a form of racketeering (?) vote for legislation to try and eliminate all background checks on firearm purchases (again, you can’t nullify federal law, Sonny) and vote for a bill to try and force physicians performing an abortion to try and revive the fetus if it is viable after the abortion (which, fetuses aren’t viable at 24 weeks, so this one is just a head-scratcher).

Sonny Borrelli even won re-election in 2018, getting to run unopposed in the GOP Primary for his seat, and winning his highly conservative district with 75% of the vote, and the Arizona GOP has decided that a former domestic abuser and hot-tempered lunatic is exactly who they want to serve as the Majority Whip in the Arizona State Senate. And that should tell you everything you need to know about the modern Republican Party.

As Borelli’s career as a State Senator has begun, he has defied any kind of logic in priorities… in the current term, he voted for a bill to declare pornography a “public health crisis”… while simultaneously voting against HIV prevention education. How… how can viewing porn be a threat, but a literal terminal, sexually transmitted disease not be? Well, that’s not the only interesting priorities Sonny Borelli has… he made sure to increase the amount of stipends he could collect for himself.

In his past term in office, Borrelli aimed to subvert democracy in his state and do everything he could to abuse his power and try and harass state officials, including claiming the (also) Republican Attorney General of the state would make “shredded ballots evaporate” as during the Arizona GOP’s sham “audit” of the 2020 election that found no voter fraud, compromised voter information to private sources, and generally embarrassed the entire state. He continually harassed the Arizona A.G., and even after all of Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” was disproven, Sonny Borrelli was still saying they proved it, and that Joe Biden’s win should be “nullified”, which there is no legal process of after someone’s been sworn in as president. Leading into the general election, he was urging the armed vigilantes who were stalking around ballot drop off boxes to “sniff out fraud”, because of course this fascist douche did that.

Yet he was allowed to run for re-election in 2022 unopposed by anyone inside or outside of his party. While we’d like to think wasting taxpayer money and compromising their personal information would be something that Borrelli would have been held into account for, we at least know term limits catch up to him in 2026.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

We have a confession.

FirrkufWAAAfijt.jpg

Well, damn! Trump finally went and admitted it. And the kicker is he probably didn't even realize what he had done.

[CaptainEurope]

Federal prosecutors on Tuesday, under the direction of newly appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith, argued to the 11th Circuit Court that they should immediately shut down the Special Master process created by Judge Aileen Cannon.

Under that process, former President Donald Trump has the opportunity to challenge the search warrant executed at his office and residence long before he is indicted. Virtually no other criminal defendant has ever been given that opportunity.

The Oral Argument Shows That The 11th Circuit Is Likely To Reverse

Based on the oral argument, it appears that the 11th Circuit is about to bring the curtain down on the sideshow that Judge Cannon created. The three judges on the panel (two appointed by Trump, one appointed by George W. Bush) expressed extreme skepticism that Judge Cannon had the jurisdiction to take any action before indictment and, even if she did, that she had no factual predicate to have enjoined the Justice Department and appointed a Special Master.

Trump will likely face jury in DC, not Florida

[shooshoomanjoe]

We have a confession.

FirrkufWAAAfijt.jpg

Is that from Twitter or truth social?

[CaptainEurope]

Is that from Twitter or truth social?

Red check means Truth Social. Trump has not taken Ellen Musk up on his gracious invitation to return to the scene of the crime.