1. #29806
    Ultimate Member Malvolio's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by WestPhillyPunisher View Post
    Man! What is it with Qpublicans that they're so freaking cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs? I know I've asked this question here before, but I just don't understand why so many members of the GQP have so much bad wiring upstairs.
    It's a chicken or egg question. Did being crazy make them join the Republican Party or did joining the Republican Party and hanging around people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Louie Gohmert make them crazy?
    Last edited by Malvolio; 06-13-2021 at 10:34 AM.
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    Ultimate Member Mister Mets's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by TheDarman View Post
    Most of the states with independent redistricting commissions are reliably blue states (see California and Colorado). The For the People Act, exclusively supported by Democrats, makes independent redistricting commissions necessary for every state.

    This is asymmetric warfare. And this is where idealism meets pragmatism. If Democrats are going to cede all the control they have over redistricting to balanced commissions while Republicans create districts like Dan Crenshaw’s in Texas, they have effectively legislated themselves completely out of the House forever and always and will be fundamentally unable to actually ensure gerrymandering is ended.

    It sucks, but you take the world as it is, not how you wish it could be.
    The independent redistricting commission was a ballot referendum voted by the people of California, and supported by the state's Republican Governor. So it may be hard to get rid of. There are some ways to manipulate it, as Democrats did by lying about their motives while pretending to be community groups making recommendations about district lines.

    https://www.propublica.org/article/h...ing-commission

    Colorado wasn't a reliably blue state until quite recently.

    It would be a bad idea for Democrats to abandon the idea of independent commissions, because it allows Republicans more license to gerrymander, and Republicans have advantages in terms of how their voters are distributed, and control of state governments.

    In fivethirtyeight's redisricting atlas, they determined that Republicans can create more reliably Republican house districts than Democrats can create reliably Democratic house districts.

    https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com...tricting-maps/

    Quote Originally Posted by numberthirty View Post
    Pritzker literally just made sure gerrymandering stayed in place.

    Not really "Playing By The Rules..."

    Also undercuts any attempt at serious criticism of Republicans doing it.
    The best example of this was the majority of Democrats in the state legislature changing their mind on independent commissions once they had unified control of the state.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/o...ering-law.html

    For the overwhelming majority of politicians, it's just pretext. The main thing is political advantage.

    Quote Originally Posted by ChadH View Post
    Unless you can somehow prove Democrats did it first and do it more often, we can chalk it up to self defense.
    We know for a fact that gerrymandering predates the Republican party, because it is named after a politician (Massachusetts Governor and Vice President Elbridge Gerry) who died forty years before the founding of the Republican party.

    Gerrymandering tends to occur when parties have control of a state government. At the moment, Republicans are better positioned to take advantage of it, as they have more trifectas (control of both state legislatures and the governor's mansion) and triplexes (control of the major statewide offices: Governor, Attorney General and Secretary of State.

    https://ballotpedia.org/State_govern..._and_triplexes

    Some infamous historical examples of gerrymanders included House Speaker Sam Rayburn having a rural district with 200,000 constituents while an urban congressman in the same state would have 900,000 constituents (despite the idea that each district should have roughly equivalent populations) and a Georgia legislator in charge of the 1980 redistricting objecting to drawing African-American districts (he used different language.)

    https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/tim...?pageNumber=31

    Pretending that gerrymandering is a uniquely Republican problem isn't going to make it easier to find solutions or political allies.
    Sincerely,
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  3. #29808
    Ultimate Member Robotman's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by worstblogever View Post
    Another update on a CSGOPOTD who has left office, and this one's a bit of a bigger fish in an even more compromising position...

    The SeditionHunters Twitter that has helped crowdsource help to ID people at the coup attempt carried out by Trump supporters on 1/6 noticed someone in the background behind someone already arrested, and then started to spot him all over the East Plaza on Jan. 6th...

    Take a peek at former GOP Congressman and all-around nutcase, Dana Rohrabacher, grinning like a doofus as insane people are incited to try and murder his former colleagues.
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    Old school comic book fan WestPhillyPunisher's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by worstblogever View Post
    Another update on a CSGOPOTD who has left office, and this one's a bit of a bigger fish in an even more compromising position...

    The SeditionHunters Twitter that has helped crowdsource help to ID people at the coup attempt carried out by Trump supporters on 1/6 noticed someone in the background behind someone already arrested, and then started to spot him all over the East Plaza on Jan. 6th...

    Take a peek at former GOP Congressman and all-around nutcase, Dana Rohrabacher, grinning like a doofus as insane people are incited to try and murder his former colleagues.
    Beyond revolting. So many utterly punchable faces among the GQP, past and present, and this asswipe is one of them.
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  5. #29810
    Invincible Jersey Ninja Tami's Avatar
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    Apple Is Said to Have Turned Over Data on Trump’s White House Counsel in 2018

    WASHINGTON — Apple told Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel to former President Donald J. Trump, last month that the Justice Department had subpoenaed information about an account that belonged to him in February 2018, and that the government barred the company from telling him at the time, according to two people briefed on the matter.

    Mr. McGahn’s wife received a similar notice from Apple, said one of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.

    It is not clear what F.B.I. agents were scrutinizing, nor whether Mr. McGahn was their specific focus. In investigations, agents sometimes compile a large list of phone numbers and email addresses that were in contact with a subject, and seek to identify all those people by using subpoenas to communications companies for any account information like names, computer addresses and credit card numbers associated with them.
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    The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Cut Make America Great Again Line From Captain America's Speech

    It took The Falcon and the Winter Soldier six episodes to get there, but eventually, Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) picked up the Captain America moniker and the iconic stars-and-stripes shield that comes with the name. In fact, the series culminates in a passionate speech in front of politicians and news cameras, broadcasting a fiery monologue from Wilson across the world. At one point, Mackie says he wanted to include a "Make America Great" reference in the speech but was shot down by studio executives.

    “With all of the protests and everything that went on in 2020, there were just as many Brown people as Black people as white people as Asian people. Everyone, everyone in this country at this time wants to see a change, and that monologue sums that up a beautiful way,” Mackie said during a virtual appearance at Marvel's Drive-In FYC event held at the Rose Bowl on Saturday.

    “One thing I wanted to put at the end of the monologue — and it got shot down — was if we’re going to ‘make America great again,’ it has to be done by Americans," the actor added. "And no matter what your race, creed, color or sexuality is, you’re an American. And that’s what I think the new Captain America captures.”
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    WOW: Tantrum-throwing #Capitol breach suspect Richard Barnett & his lawyer just went on Russian state-owned TV.

    Reporter asks if he'll do it again

    Lawyer cuts Richard off, then Richard goes on a rant about living and dying by the constitution.
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  8. #29813
    Ultimate Member Mister Mets's Avatar
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    Journalist George Packer has a new book about four competing narratives for America.

    "Free America" is a libertarian view of the world, the narrative for Ronald Reagan and Paul Ryan.

    Call the first narrative “Free America.” In the past half century it’s been the most politically powerful of the four. Free America draws on libertarian ideas, which it installs in the high-powered engine of consumer capitalism. The freedom it champions is very different from Alexis de Tocqueville’s art of self-government. It’s personal freedom, without other people—the negative liberty of “Don’t tread on me.” ​
    "Smart America" is a generally left-wing meritocracy that might now be called neoliberalism. Its major political figures would include JFK, Bill Clinton, Mike Bloomberg and Barack Obama.

    The new knowledge economy created a new class of Americans: men and women with college degrees, skilled with symbols and numbers—salaried professionals in information technology, computer engineering, scientific research, design, management consulting, the upper civil service, financial analysis, law, journalism, the arts, higher education. They go to college with one another, intermarry, gravitate to desirable neighborhoods in large metropolitan areas, and do all they can to pass on their advantages to their children. They are not 1 percenters—those are mainly executives and investors—but they dominate the top 10 percent of American incomes, with outsize economic and cultural influence.

    They’re at ease in the world that modernity created. They were early adopters of things that make the surface of contemporary life agreeable: HBO, Lipitor, MileagePlus Platinum, the MacBook Pro, grass-fed organic beef, cold-brewed coffee, Amazon Prime. They welcome novelty and relish diversity. They believe that the transnational flow of human beings, information, goods, and capital ultimately benefits most people around the world. You have a hard time telling what part of the country they come from, because their local identities are submerged in the homogenizing culture of top universities and elite professions. They believe in credentials and expertise—not just as tools for success, but as qualifications for class entry. They’re not nationalistic—quite the opposite—but they have a national narrative. Call it “Smart America.”

    The cosmopolitan outlook of Smart America overlaps in some areas with the libertarian views of Free America. Each embraces capitalism and the principle of meritocracy: the belief that your talent and effort should determine your reward. But to the meritocrats of Smart America, some government interventions are necessary for everyone to have an equal chance to move up. The long history of racial injustice demands remedies such as affirmative action, diversity hiring, and maybe even reparations. The poor need a social safety net and a living wage; poor children deserve higher spending on education and health care. Workers dislocated by trade agreements, automation, and other blows of the global economy should be retrained for new kinds of jobs.

    Still, there’s a limit to how much government the meritocrats will accept. Social liberalism comes easier to them than redistribution, especially as they accumulate wealth and look to their 401(k)s for long-term security. As for unions, they hardly exist in Smart America. They’re instruments of class solidarity, not individual advancement, and the individual is the unit of worth in Smart America as in Free America.
    "Real America" is the traditional values of small -town America. Sarah Palin was probably the political figure who best defined it, although Donald Trump did appeal to this group.

    From its beginnings, Real America has also been religious, and in a particular way: evangelical and fundamentalist, hostile to modern ideas and intellectual authority. The truth will enter every simple heart, and it doesn’t come in shades of gray. “If we have to give up either religion or education, we should give up education,” said Bryan, in whom populist democracy and fundamentalist Christianity were joined until they broke him apart at the Scopes “monkey trial” in 1925.

    Finally, Real America has a strong nationalist character. Its attitude toward the rest of the world is isolationist, hostile to humanitarianism and international engagement, but ready to respond aggressively to any incursion against national interests. The purity and strength of Americanism are always threatened by contamination from outside and betrayal from within. The narrative of Real America is white Christian nationalism.

    Real America isn’t a shining city on a hill with its gates open to freedom-loving people everywhere. Nor is it a cosmopolitan club to which the right talents and credentials will get you admitted no matter who you are or where you’re from. It’s a provincial village where everyone knows everyone’s business, no one has much more money than anyone else, and only a few misfits ever move away. The villagers can fix their own boilers, and they go out of their way to help a neighbor in a jam. A new face on the street will draw immediate attention and suspicion.
    "Just America" is the narrative of younger progressives.

    Call this narrative “Just America.” It’s another rebellion from below. As Real America breaks down the ossified libertarianism of Free America, Just America assails the complacent meritocracy of Smart America. It does the hard, essential thing that the other three narratives avoid, that white Americans have avoided throughout history. It forces us to see the straight line that runs from slavery and segregation to the second-class life so many Black Americans live today—the betrayal of equality that has always been the country’s great moral shame, the heart of its social problems.

    But Just America has a dissonant sound, for in its narrative, justice and America never rhyme. A more accurate name would be Unjust America, in a spirit of attack rather than aspiration. For Just Americans, the country is less a project of self-government to be improved than a site of continuous wrong to be battled. In some versions of the narrative, the country has no positive value at all—it can never be made better.

    In the same way that libertarian ideas had been lying around for Americans to pick up in the stagflated 1970s, young people coming of age in the disillusioned 2000s were handed powerful ideas about social justice to explain their world. The ideas came from different intellectual traditions: the Frankfurt School in 1920s Germany, French postmodernist thinkers of the 1960s and ’70s, radical feminism, Black studies. They converged and recombined in American university classrooms, where two generations of students were taught to think as critical theorists.

    Critical theory upends the universal values of the Enlightenment: objectivity, rationality, science, equality, freedom of the individual. These liberal values are an ideology by which one dominant group subjugates another. All relations are power relations, everything is political, and claims of reason and truth are social constructs that maintain those in power. Unlike orthodox Marxism, critical theory is concerned with language and identity more than with material conditions. In place of objective reality, critical theorists place subjectivity at the center of analysis to show how supposedly universal terms exclude oppressed groups and help the powerful rule over them. Critical theorists argue that the Enlightenment, including the American founding, carried the seeds of modern racism and imperialism.
    He thinks all of these views have their shortcomings.

    All four of the narratives I’ve described emerged from America’s failure to sustain and enlarge the middle-class democracy of the postwar years. They all respond to real problems. Each offers a value that the others need and lacks ones that the others have. Free America celebrates the energy of the unencumbered individual. Smart America respects intelligence and welcomes change. Real America commits itself to a place and has a sense of limits. Just America demands a confrontation with what the others want to avoid. They rise from a single society, and even in one as polarized as ours they continually shape, absorb, and morph into one another. But their tendency is also to divide us, pitting tribe against tribe. These divisions impoverish each narrative into a cramped and ever more extreme version of itself.

    All four narratives are also driven by a competition for status that generates fierce anxiety and resentment. They all anoint winners and losers. In Free America, the winners are the makers, and the losers are the takers who want to drag the rest down in perpetual dependency on a smothering government. In Smart America, the winners are the credentialed meritocrats, and the losers are the poorly educated who want to resist inevitable progress. In Real America, the winners are the hardworking folk of the white Christian heartland, and the losers are treacherous elites and contaminating others who want to destroy the country. In Just America, the winners are the marginalized groups, and the losers are the dominant groups that want to go on dominating.

    I don’t much want to live in the republic of any of them.
    It's an interesting way of looking at current political strands. There does seem to be at least one missing group, a realistic America that just wants the garbage trucks to run on time. Jim Clyburn would be an example.
    Sincerely,
    Thomas Mets

  9. #29814
    My Face Is Up Here Powerboy's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mister Mets View Post
    Journalist George Packer has a new book about four competing narratives for America.

    "Free America" is a libertarian view of the world, the narrative for Ronald Reagan and Paul Ryan.



    "Smart America" is a generally left-wing meritocracy that might now be called neoliberalism. Its major political figures would include JFK, Bill Clinton, Mike Bloomberg and Barack Obama.



    "Real America" is the traditional values of small -town America. Sarah Palin was probably the political figure who best defined it, although Donald Trump did appeal to this group.



    "Just America" is the narrative of younger progressives.



    He thinks all of these views have their shortcomings.



    It's an interesting way of looking at current political strands. There does seem to be at least one missing group, a realistic America that just wants the garbage trucks to run on time. Jim Clyburn would be an example.
    I would say that the strongest appeal that is driving Trumpism or current Conservatives at the level of the mass voting base is "Real America". As I think you said, it's regressive, anti-intellectual, anti-education when it comes to any education that teaches anything but it's values or defies it's beliefs. It's religious in the worst most reality denying ways. It's suspicious and isolationist. It's white Christians for white Christians. But you can be of another race and get in as long as you are Fundamentalist Christian and as long as it's a small town and there are not enough of you (non-whites) to become threatening. Unfortunately, I feel that it has become the driving and most populated Conservative voting group.
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  10. #29815
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mister Mets View Post
    "Free America" is a libertarian view of the world, the narrative for Ronald Reagan and Paul Ryan.
    Neither are really libertarian. Too infected with Christian posturing to be libertarians.

    "Smart America" is a generally left-wing meritocracy that might now be called neoliberalism.
    Neoliberalism is the political-economic consensus operational since Thatcher and Reagan (though actually beginning under Jimmy Carter to some extent). Both parties were involved with Neoliberalism, though Obama far less than anyone before him, and far less than Trump anyway.

    He thinks all of these views have their shortcomings.
    Classic golden mean fallacy that inherently assumes all stated viewpoints merit equal interest and engagement.

    There does seem to be at least one missing group, a realistic America that just wants the garbage trucks to run on time. Jim Clyburn would be an example.
    That's actually not representative of Jim Clyburn's views at all. Contrary to what you would like to believe, Clyburn isn't Joe Manchin.

  11. #29816
    Extraordinary Member CaptainEurope's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by worstblogever View Post
    Another update on a CSGOPOTD who has left office, and this one's a bit of a bigger fish in an even more compromising position...

    The SeditionHunters Twitter that has helped crowdsource help to ID people at the coup attempt carried out by Trump supporters on 1/6 noticed someone in the background behind someone already arrested, and then started to spot him all over the East Plaza on Jan. 6th...

    Take a peek at former GOP Congressman and all-around nutcase, Dana Rohrabacher, grinning like a doofus as insane people are incited to try and murder his former colleagues.
    Maybe he gave the mob confidential maps of the Capitol, so they knew how to find Pelosi's office etc?

  12. #29817

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    Quote Originally Posted by CaptainEurope View Post
    Maybe he gave the mob confidential maps of the Capitol, so they knew how to find Pelosi's office etc?
    I remember just after the attack that Rep. Jim Clyburn noted the mob was looking for him at a location that's his actual working office within the Capitol that isn't listed anywhere, and he noted for people to be looking for him there, SOMEBODY had to tip people off who know his comings and goings more than what is general public knowledge.

    Rohrabacher is that kind of nut. But then again, so are Gosar, Biggs, Boebert, MTG, and several others. The GQP is a who's who of kooks, and there's a lot of names that could end up turning up at the end of us that I wouldn't be shocked. Like if someone finds out Matt Gaetz passed something along to the Proud Boys, would we be shocked? Andy Harris? Devin Nunes? Louie Gohmert?

    There's more potential "inside guys" on this than suspects in a Poirot mystery.
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  13. #29818
    Old school comic book fan WestPhillyPunisher's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by worstblogever View Post
    I remember just after the attack that Rep. Jim Clyburn noted the mob was looking for him at a location that's his actual working office within the Capitol that isn't listed anywhere, and he noted for people to be looking for him there, SOMEBODY had to tip people off who know his comings and goings more than what is general public knowledge.

    Rohrabacher is that kind of nut. But then again, so are Gosar, Biggs, Boebert, MTG, and several others. The GQP is a who's who of kooks, and there's a lot of names that could end up turning up at the end of us that I wouldn't be shocked. Like if someone finds out Matt Gaetz passed something along to the Proud Boys, would we be shocked? Andy Harris? Devin Nunes? Louie Gohmert?

    There's more potential "inside guys" on this than suspects in a Poirot mystery.
    Which was why Moscow Mitch and his fellow Qpublicans were hellbent on killing the bipartisan 1/6 commission, because they didn't want it known they had passed information to the rioters.
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  14. #29819

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    Quote Originally Posted by WestPhillyPunisher View Post
    Which was why Moscow Mitch and his fellow Qpublicans were hellbent on killing the bipartisan 1/6 commission, because they didn't want it known they had passed information to the rioters.
    Mitch McConnell's speech where he's near tears on 1/6 seemed really out of character. And the only thing that would make that soulless husk of a man teary-eyed is the thought that thinks got f***ed up so bad that he might lose power going forward. He just learned days earlier he would be Senate Minority Leader again, but after 1/6, it looked like Cruz and Hawley could be expelled for associating with insurrectionists... but after he dug in to filibuster the creation of a bipartisan commission, that POS is trying to block it so he can hold out some hope of pulling an upset in the mid-terms and winning some Senate seats back... even though far more Republican seats are up for grabs than Democratic ones.
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  15. #29820
    Ultimate Member Mister Mets's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by WestPhillyPunisher View Post
    Which was why Moscow Mitch and his fellow Qpublicans were hellbent on killing the bipartisan 1/6 commission, because they didn't want it known they had passed information to the rioters.
    Five months later, there's no indication that a current or former member of Congress gave inside information to rioters, let alone that concern about this is driving the actions of Republican leadership.

    If there was anyone giving inside information, there are a lot of people with working knowledge of the capitol layout, including current and former staff, and the ostensibly apolitical employees (maintenance, security, etc.) who outnumber current and former elected officials by quite a bit.


    Quote Originally Posted by worstblogever View Post
    Mitch McConnell's speech where he's near tears on 1/6 seemed really out of character. And the only thing that would make that soulless husk of a man teary-eyed is the thought that thinks got f***ed up so bad that he might lose power going forward. He just learned days earlier he would be Senate Minority Leader again, but after 1/6, it looked like Cruz and Hawley could be expelled for associating with insurrectionists... but after he dug in to filibuster the creation of a bipartisan commission, that POS is trying to block it so he can hold out some hope of pulling an upset in the mid-terms and winning some Senate seats back... even though far more Republican seats are up for grabs than Democratic ones.
    It didn't seem likely that at any point Cruz or Hawley would be expelled for associating with insurrectionists.

    But even if that were to happen, that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing for McConnell. If he could press a magic button and replace Cruz or Hawley with generic Senators appointed by the governors of Texas and Missouri, he'd be happy to do so.
    Sincerely,
    Thomas Mets

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