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

[MajorHoy]

I remember reading at the time that McCain wanted to pick Joe Lieberman as his running mate, but the Republican Party didn't want him picking someone who until recently had been a Democrat.

And remember, Lieberman ran as an independent for his last term in the U.S. Senate, but he never changed parties from Democratic to Republican.

Some members of the Republican Party have been formerly registered democrats, including Trump.

As for famous Republicans who had once upon a time been Democrats, Ronald Reagan had originally been a Democrat.

[Mister Mets]

The mainstream media was quite positive about his run until he picked Sarah Palin.

The media turned against McCain a few months before that. They loved Obama.
The New York Times settled a libel suit by a lobbyist they implied had an affair with McCain.https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/20/b...20lawsuit.html

There were pieces about the media's preference for Obama that were published before McCain picked Palin as a running mate. One big moment was when the New York Times declined to publish an op-ed by McCain on the Iraq war.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...in.barackobama

https://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/07...age/index.html

IMO, McCain would have won had he chosen a better VP.

It seems really unlikely that a VP makes that much of a difference.https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...votes-in-2008/

Some scholarship suggests that Palin costs McCain two points. He lost by seven, and he lost the tipping point state (Colorado) in the electoral college by nine.
https://newrepublic.com/article/7840...in-hurt-mccain

So maybe if McCain had picked a generic running mate like Romney or Pawlenty, he likely would have won North Carolina, Indiana and Nebraska's second congressional district. Had he picked a fantastic running mate, maybe he could have flipped Florida. But it wouldn't be enough for Ohio (4.6 point gap), or Virginia (6.7 points) and even if it were, that brings him to 260 electoral votes.

There are some intangibles. Had he gone with someone pro-choice like Tom Ridge or Christie Todd Whitman, it might've hurt turnout with social conservatives.

The incumbent Republican President had a low approval rating, and there's been only one time a party kept the White House for more than two consecutive terms in the last 65+ years, so he had a lot of headwinds.

[Ragged Maw]

Painting your enemy as bloodthirsty barbarians is a tried and true method of whipping your people into a war fervor, and this has been a tactic that we've seen repeatedly throughout history from the USS Maine to the Gulf of Tonkin incident to the WMDs in Iraq.

Turkey agrees, albeit with the caveat that they didn't need to describe "bloodthirsty barbarians" so much as "evil masterminds". Anyways, it worked out for them pretty damn well when they blamed Armenian subterfuge for their loss in the Battle of Sarikamish. That and a convenient claim of an Armenian conspiracy ("proven" by pockets of resistance against brutal purges) helped them graduate from massacres into full-scale genocide.

BTW, I'm glad you brought up Nazi Germany because the Nazis indeed took note of said mass murder, and in fact, they thought it was so well executed that they decided to include its blueprint (lessons, tactics, benefits, etc.) into realizing their utopian vision of Germany. Sound familiar?

[PwrdOn]

Turkey agrees, albeit with the caveat that they didn't need to describe "bloodthirsty barbarians" so much as "evil masterminds". Anyways, it worked out for them pretty damn well when they blamed Armenian subterfuge for their loss in the Battle of Sarikamish. That and a convenient claim of an Armenian conspiracy ("proven" by pockets of resistance against brutal purges) helped them graduate from massacres into full-scale genocide.

BTW, I'm glad you brought up Nazi Germany because the Nazis indeed took note of said mass murder, and in fact, they thought it was so well executed that they decided to include its blueprint (lessons, tactics, benefits, etc.) into realizing their utopian vision of Germany. Sound familiar?

I like how just yesterday you didn't even know enough about the Armenian genocide to distinguish the perpetrators from the victims, and now apparently you're informed enough about the subject to try and lecture me about it. Wikipedia is a useful resource to be sure, but if I were to start lecturing you about your hometown based on reading the opening paragraph of its Wikipedia article, would you think I was credible? And yes while Hitler did make that quip about the Armenian genocide being already forgotten by his time, his actual vision for Germany was inspired mostly by Jim Crow, though even he found the one drop rule to be too harsh. Also who exactly these days is citing the Nazis as an inspiration?

[Ragged Maw]

I like how just yesterday you didn't even know enough about the Armenian genocide to distinguish the perpetrators from the victims, and now apparently you're informed enough about the subject to try and lecture me about it. Wikipedia is a useful resource to be sure, but if I were to start lecturing you about your hometown based on reading the opening paragraph of its Wikipedia article, would you think I was credible? And yes while Hitler did make that quip about the Armenian genocide being already forgotten by his time, his actual vision for Germany was inspired mostly by Jim Crow, though even he found the one drop rule to be too harsh. Also who exactly these days is citing the Nazis as an inspiration?

Hitler still admitted the genocide did happen. And so what if Jim Crow also went into the plans. So did the Armenian genocide. A fucked-up think tank, to be sure. Anyways, Turkey's still denying.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, as well as 2019, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day posted profiles of Virginia State Senator Dick Black, a man whose voting record included support for welfare drug testing, statistically unnecessary voter ID laws, medically unnecessary ultrasounds for women seeking abortions, and trying to allow adoption agencies to deny gay couples the ability to adopt children based on “religious principles”. But where Black truly stands out is a series of comments through the years he’s made. Black is a former military prosecutor who has stated his feeling that rape was “as predictable as human nature”, and once argued that he wouldn’t prosecute spousal rape because women “wear nighties”. Black also has referred to birth control as “baby pesticide”, blamed the Columbine Massacre on children not being forced to respect their elders by calling them “ma’am or sir” in school, and argued against the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” because he felt it would cause HIV and AIDS to spread through our military’s ranks. He’s also ranted about illegal immigrants spreading the Ebola Virus, praised Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, compared abortion to the Holocaust, and sent tiny dolls of fetuses to the entire Virginia State Assembly, asking them if they would “kill the child” he had sent them by voting against an anti-abortion bill. To put it succinctly, this guy is a friggin’ loon (there’s WAY more in that original entry).

Black made a run at a seat in Congress in 2014, trying to represent Virginia's 10th Congressional District, and failed, and going into the 2019 elections, he's probably going to be more concerned about holding onto ANY seat. Black was regrettably re-elected in the 2015 election in Virginia, with views on social issues more appropriate to 1820. This may have had a lot to do with the fact that he exploited paranoid fears over Planned Parenthood based on a certain faux "sting" video created by the Center for Medical Progress and accused his opponent, a pediatrician named Jill McCabe, of being in favor of late term abortions because she "supports late term abortions. Larger baby parts are more profitable". That was enough of a lie to earn a "Pants on Fire" rating from Politifact, but still dragged Dick Black to the finish line, where he won with 52% of the vote.

In 2016, Black was trying to ban “sexually explicit” instructional material from public schools in Virginia, supporting HB 516, and the main offending work that outraged a parent and moved the bill forward was Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”, but critics of the bill noted that the ban could have applied to any book that included sexual themes, at all. So watch out, huffing and puffing at the door of obscenity was Dick Black, who went online to rail against “Beloved” and its scene where t “a hunchbacked older man fantasizes in detail about raping a little girl and leaving her in a pool of her own blood”, continuing, “If it's so graphic that Gwaker can't even print it for their adult readers, then parents should have the right to know.”.… but apparently attacked the wrong Toni Morrison book, discussing explicit content from her first book, “The Bluest Eye”, and misidentifying the online news site Gawker.com with a glaring typo. And Gawker was just not going to let that stand, not only correcting him, but highlighting Twitter users that point out the Bible has scenes where graphic drunken incest and prostitutes being dismembered are written about, and that’s not a problem for Dick Black.

Again, Black supported HB 516, but Gov. Terry McAuliffe was there with a veto stamp to save the day, because it was a glaring violation of our First Amendment and all that. Dick Black spent the 2016 elections to get Ted Cruz nominated as the GOP's pick for president. During that failed effort, he managed to pop off and again brazenly lie about a lady running for office. this time claiming that Hillary Clinton's immigration policy, that she supported the idea, amounted to "ethnic cleansing", ranting in particular about Muslims coming into our country from the Middle East. So you would think that railing against ethnic cleansing would mean Dick Black is disgusted by dictators who kill their own people by the thousands, right? HA! Remember, we're talking about a deranged moron who has previously praised Bashar-al-Assad. That made it a bit less surprising that in January of 2017, Black openly praised the president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, for carrying out a brutal "war on drugs" that was just a cover for executing thousands of homeless people in his country. Black regarded these Duterte death squads as a good thing, because here in the U.S., we just allow people to smoke marijuana cigarettes. Almost immediately after we ran our last profile of Dick Black, he made the news in Virginia again by going out of his way to make statements about how Syrian dictator Bashar-al-Assad could not have ordered nerve gas to be used against his own people because he has “no motive” to do so: Yes, Dick Black is trying to make people believe that the poor Assad regime is just being framed by ISIS. Mercifully, Dick Black opted to not run for re-election in 2019.



On this date one year ago, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day”, profiled Guy Reschenthaler, the U.S. House Representative from Pennsylvania’s 14th Congressional District and a former member of the Pennsylvania State Senate. Reschenthaler’s reputation as a young up-and-comer in the GOP stems from his work as serving as the defense in a military trial for a Navy SEAL accused of covering up the assault of Ahmad Hashim Abd al-Isawi while he was being detained prior to his execution. And if there’s anything the Republican Party loves right now, it’d defending war crimes.

Anyway, Reschenthaler’s political career is somewhat miraculous given what he was doing upon returning home from Iraq… he was the co-host of a radio show with white nationalist Carl Higbie, who on-air, likes to comment about how African Americans don’t “contribute equally to society”, and that “the black race is lazier than the white race”. And Reschenthaler would like to distance himself from his old racist, sexist, homophobic buddy from conservative radio, and pretend that he barely even knows the guy… and yet he wrote the forward for Higbie’s book, which contains discussions about Hurricane Katrina survivors ("human parasites"), slavery ("I certainly don't agree with slavery, but I do think that you should play the hand you are dealt, and good physical genetics are definitely dealt to many blacks"), Puerto Ricans ("If you are so proud of your old country, then go back"), LGBTQ people ("widespread acceptance is wrong"), Muslims ("it is also my right to be suspicious" of someone wearing a turban), and undocumented immigrants (those who attempt to cross the border should be shot "dead"). When called out for it, Reschenthaler insisted he hadn’t read the book he wrote a glowing forward for.

It will not be surprising to you, then, that Guy Reschenthaler is also a huge cheerleader for Donald Trump, to the extent that it seems to be what he spends most of his energy on since he arrived in Washington, D.C. Whether is was how he rolled up his sleeves to harass Robert Mueller when he testified before Congress or spread conspiracy theories about his investigation into Donald Trump obstructing justice, or calling Trump’s impeachment “Soviet-esque” (while choosing to not attend hearings to actually try and defend the president). As late as February 12th, 2020, Reschenthaler was giddy as he went on Fox Business to declare “Donald Trump is doing better than ever!”, which lines up on the timeline of a stretch where Trump was ignoring warnings about COVID-19 while hitting the links, and on the precipice of a looming Stock Market Crash due to it.

[worstblogever]

As for Reschenthaler's voting record of late:

• January 23rd, 2019: Rep. Reschenthaler also voted against HR 648, because he was gleefully enjoying the longest government shutdown in history.
• February 28th, 2019: Guy Reschenthaler votes against HR 1112, a bill which would have required universal background checks on all firearm purchases, and close the gun show loophole.
• March 14th, 2019: Rep. Reschenthaler votes against HJR 46, which sane members of Congress voted for to reject Donald Trump’s “national emergency” regarding the U.S. border and his attempts to reallocate funds for a border wall without Congressional approval.
• June 4th, 2019: Rep. Reschenthaler votes against the Dreamers Act, because he’s too xenophobic and partisan to care about immigration reform.
• July 16th, 2019: Guy Reschenthaler votes against a resolution to condemn Donald Trump for his racist statements that four people of color in Congress should “go back where they came from”.
• October 23rd, 2019: Reschenthaler is one of 41 Republicans who, while staring down the possibility of Donald Trump being impeached, stage a ridiculous publicity stunt in response by crashing a classified impeachment inquiry hearing for a “protest”.
• December 18th, 2019: Rep. Reschenthaler ignores his Congressional duty to hold a president who has been proven to commit high crimes and misdemeanors accountable and votes against the first impeachment of Donald Trump.
• May 15th, 2020: Reschenthaler votes against the HEROES Act, to further support the healthcare industry and citizens affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.
• January 6th, 2021: Guy Reschenthaler votes for the objection to the electoral college’s votes in the 2020 election, a failure to send any sort of message that he wasn’t intimidated or sympathetic to those who attacked the Capitol to attempt a violent coup.
• January 13th, 2021: Rep. Reschenthaler votes against the second impeachment of Donald Trump, because the Republican Party no longer feels like they should be accountable for anything, including failed coups that result in the deaths of both their participants and police officers.
• February 4th, 2021: Guy Reschenthaler votes to keep Marjorie Taylor Greene’s committee assignments, because he wouldn’t want her to be accountable for all the bigoted remarks and conspiracy theories she’s spread online (probably because she’s a kindred spirit).
• February 25th, 2021: Reschenthaler votes against HR 5, the latest version of the Equality Act, that would provide workplace protections for LGBTQ Americans.
• March 3rd, 2021: Rep. Reschenthaler votes against HR 1, a bill created to prevent the corruption of money in politics, and protect voter access to the ballot box.
• March 3rd, 2021: Guy Reschenthaler votes against the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021.
• March 10th, 2021: Reschenthaler votes against the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, because he feels people deserve to die in poverty during a pandemic.
• March 17th, 2021: Rep. Reschenthaler is one of 172 Republicans who choose to vote against the re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act, likely because they feel the 2nd Amendment remaining absolute is more important than preventing people with a history of domestic abuse from owning a firearm (which statistics show, makes them more likely to use those firearms against women in their lives).

Pennsylvania’s 14th Congressional District has a +14 Republican lean in the Cook Partisan Voting Index, so he was obviously easily re-elected in 2020, getting 65% of the vote. He is currently angling to still try to make a run to replace the retiring U.S. Senator Pat Toomey, while trying to play off his vote against certifying the results of the 2020 election not as “seditious” but “symbolic”.

We hope John Fetterman, the giant that he is, grinds Reschenthaler’s bones into bread on the campaign trail, should Guy try to weasel his way into the upper chamber.

[worstblogever]

Another Republican from Florida arrested for being a sexual predator.

Florida Elections Commission lawyer Eric Lipman, registered Republican, arrested on 11 counts of child pornography.

[Malvolio]

And remember, Lieberman ran as an independent for his last term in the U.S. Senate, but he never changed parties from Democratic to Republican.

As for famous Republicans who had once upon a time been Democrats, Ronald Reagan had originally been a Democrat.

This is kind of what I meant. Lieberman was a Democrat, but he would have switched to Republican if McCain had asked him to be his running mate.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Another Republican from Florida arrested for being a sexual predator.

Florida Elections Commission lawyer Eric Lipman, registered Republican, arrested on 11 counts of child pornography.

Qpublicans, the party of family values, yo!

[MajorHoy]

This is kind of what I meant. Lieberman was a Democrat, but he would have switched to Republican if McCain had asked him to be his running mate.

I don't think I've ever heard about Lieberman willing to switch to being a Republican before . . .

[Gray Lensman]

I don't think I've ever heard about Lieberman willing to switch to being a Republican before . . .

But I think an unaffiliated independent might have been possible.

[Tendrin]

OH WBE-Eeeeeeeeeeeeee....

One to keep an eye on, inevitably:

https://twitter.com/FPWellman/status...65930846461954

[CaptainEurope]

None of the 16 former senior Trump admin officials, ex-campaign brass, longtime GOP operatives, and sources close to the ex-president contacted by The Daily Beast were willing to defend Gaetz on the record. None of them would even do so anonymously.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/facing...going-anywhere

[Zauriel]

I don't think I've ever heard about Lieberman willing to switch to being a Republican before . . .

When Abraham Lincoln asked Andrew Johnson, a democrat to be his running mate, Johnson didn't switch parties and remained a democrat.