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

[numberthirty]

For instance...

This is the reaction to just the press getting into this sort of thing.



You have a bunch of folks having to justify just how close to the line they have been skating because they are dealing with investigations the public are hearing about?

A lot of clear issues will start to sort themselves out.

[Tendrin]

Just a reminder, every time a conservative pops up talking about how drag is a problem, it all goes back to freaks like this:

areminder.jpg

[CaptainEurope]

LOE
(laughing out in exasperation)

FjPGLNsWIAMxw4r.jpg

[Tendrin]

LOE
(laughing out in exasperation)

FjPGLNsWIAMxw4r.jpg

Glem is just a ridiculous person.

[Tendrin]

What.

Just... what.

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) was a part of Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker’s final campaign push on Sunday afternoon, two days before the runoff vote between him and sitting Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock (D). While Walker himself had a number of odd things to say over the weekend, it looks like fake folksy Kennedy was intent on adding his voice to the bizarre chorus.

Kennedy, while wearing a sticker reading “RUN HERSCHEL RUN,” railed against “these high IQ stupid people” running around Congress at a campaign stop in Loganville, Georgia, on Sunday afternoon. “These high IQ stupid people have an answer for everything. You know why? Because they think they’re smarter and more virtuous than the American people,” he said.

Chriist.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...fbef4c5f501907

[Tendrin]

Russia is just a little further ahead of where the Republican party wants to go.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia intensified his crackdown on L.G.B.T.Q. people on Monday, when he signed new legislation that widely bans public expression of their identity in the country.

The new law makes it illegal to spread “propaganda” about “nontraditional sexual relations” in the media, advertising, movies or on social media. It had passed the Duma, Russia’s Parliament, by a vote of 397 to 0 on Nov. 24.

Demonstrations of “nontraditional relationships or preferences” will also be completely barred from advertising, and from any outlet visible to minors. Distributing to minors any information “that causes children to want to change their sex” was also prohibited.

The law is likely to put another strain on a community that has already been largely stigmatized in a country where officials have cast the repression of L.G.B.T.Q. expression as part of a wider struggle to protect Russia from Western interference.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/05/w...smid=share-url

[WestPhillyPunisher]

What.

Just... what.


Chriist.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...fbef4c5f501907

Words just fail me.

Russia is just a little further ahead of where the Republican party wants to go.



https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/05/w...smid=share-url

I'm sure Qpublicans creamed their boxers and panties (I won't argue over who wears what) after reading that piece, hoping they can enact similarly draconian laws here. And let's not be naive, they DAMN sure want to, perhaps even go further than what Bad Vlad had done.

[Tami]

What.

Just... what.


Chriist.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...fbef4c5f501907

He just called Americans Stupid. More evidence that Republicans really do believe that their base is dumb and that they like it that way.

[Zauriel]

Michael Avenatti sentenced to 14 years in prison

“Michael Avenatti was a corrupt lawyer who claimed he was fighting for the little guy. In fact, he only cared about his own selfish interests,” US Attorney Martin Estrada said in a statement following the sentencing. “He stole millions of dollars from his clients – all to finance his extravagant lifestyle that included a private jet and race cars. As a result of his illegal acts, he has lost his right to practice law in California, and now he will serve a richly deserved prison sentence.”

Serves him right. He defrauded and embezzled his clients an tried to extort a mega-conglomerate. did he really think he could get away with it?

This is not his first conviction and prison sentence

He already got two prison sentences prior to this news today .

I hope he's enjoyed his extravagant lifestyle because he still has life in a prison ahead of him.

If I were him, I would retire to quiet life in a secluded monastery, when he is released from prison.

[CaptainEurope]

He is actually facing 20 years or so, as this sentence won't start until he finishes his time for a different trial and sentence.

Good. Guy's a crook.

[worstblogever]

I hope there's more to it than that.

Seriously, we can't hold a 70+ year old man accountable for what his 50+ year old man does in his private life.

Now, if Hunter Biden did something illegal that Joe Biden was involved in, then that could be something damaging.

Beyond that, a 40 or 50-something-year-old Hunter Biden going on a coke bender is really not important nor is it anyone's business. That's entirely a matter that Hunter Biden needs to sort out on his own.

Meanwhile, the whole Trump Organization, with the whole family is on trial for tax fraud. One person on trial was president. One was a nepotism hire within his White House. The company had taxpayer dollars being funneled through his connections as president, and charging the Secret Service overpriced sums of money to stay at them while serving to protect him. As well as having government employees going out of the way to curry favor by staying at his properties on the dime.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2014, "Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day" ran a profile of Cynthia Davis, an ethically-challenged former member of the Missouri House of Representatives who not only wanted creation taught in school classrooms, but tried preventing children from learning about any other kind of sex education that wasn’t abstinence. Her quest to make the lives of Missouri’s children more terrible expanded beyond that, though, as she earned an appearance on the Colbert Report for her opposition to getting poor children free meals during the summer because it would “rob them of their ambition”, and suggested they should work as child labor at McDonald’s to earn themselves a free meal based on her assessment that “hunger can be a positive motivator”. Davis was also a key ally of self-titled Birther Queen Orly Taitz, accompanying her in person at court hearings over the lawsuit she filed about President Obama’s Birth Certificate, and accused the court of bias for ruling against Taitz, claiming they only did so because she had an accent. Wrapping things up, Davis wrote a newsletter in 2009 where she proclaimed that “racism is dead”. Cynthia Davis has been out of office since 2010, when she failed to move on to the Missouri State Senate after facing term limits in the Missouri House. She made a 2012 run to try to win office as Missouri Lieutenant Governor as a member of the somehow even more rabid right wing Constitution Party, but lost and has not turned up on a ballot in the four years since.

On this date in 2015, Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day posted profiles of Chris Corley, a member of the South Carolina House of Representatives who held up a white surrender flag to mock any Republicans who voted to remove the Confederate flag from the grounds of the state capitol after a fellow legislator was assassinated at the Charleston AME Emanuel Church by a White Nationalist, Dylann Roof. And, Corley still wasn't over his love for the Stars & Bars, as he sent Christmas cards out to all the legislators who voted for the flag's removal, forgiving them "for all their sins such as betrayal" a few months later. Corley was allowed to run for re-election unopposed, but ended up getting booted from office after being arrested on domestic violence charges over the 2016 holiday season.

On this date in 2016, "Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day" profiled Steve Hickey, a member of the South Dakota House of Representatives from 2011-2015, which many Democrats in South Dakota found alarming because of his background as a pastor with quite extreme views on abortion and LGBTQ rights. Those concerns were not unfounded. In January of 2014, Hickey turned heads by sponsoring one of the first "religious freedom" brand of bills in the country that were actually just legalizing the discrimination towards the gay community. Bizarrely, Hickey tried justifying it with the ludicrous statement that "gay rights are taking us down the road to Iran", because he's apparently unaware of how Iran punishes homosexuals with flogging or even the death penalty. Go figure. But then again, Hickey also believes that legalized gay marriage would have left him open to lawsuits as a pastor, so we're not talking about someone whose elevator goes all the way up, here. In May of 2014, for whatever reason, Steve Hickey was particularly upset about all the butt stuff happening in these United States, and decided to write an opinion editorial for the local paper, the Argus Leader about it. They found it... inappropriate for publication, and Hickey, outraged that they wouldn't go with his column, got on Facebook to post his vile and crude letter, titled, "A One Way Alley for the Garbage Truck", where he accused the entire medical community of creating a conspiracy to cover up the risks of anal sex. After a wave of criticism from LGBT groups, media outlets, and just sane people, Hickey refused to apologize or back down from his assertion. Steve Hickey was actually one of the first people in South Dakota to question the signatures being submitted by Annette Bosworth in her run for U.S. Senate were done so improperly, which makes it pretty hypocritical that he may have done the exact same thing in 2012 to get on the ballot as a state legislator. Before the walls closed in and he was arrested for forgery, Steve Hickey resigned from the South Dakota House of Representatives in July of 2015, deciding to travel to Aberdeen, Scotland, to try and get a PHD in Christian ethics.

On this date in 2019, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profiled Bill Drennan, a candidate for the Virginia State Assembly in the 2019 elections, attempting to flip District 87 for Republicans. Drennan is some old blood in the Virginia GOP, having once served as a military aide in the Reagan administration who claimed to have once been responsible for the nuclear football. His views on women, however, sound like the sort of insanity you would expect from that era. Because during a forum discussion on abortion, Drennan decided to come up with the policy suggestion to give women who get abortions ankle bracelets to track them like common criminals, saying “The number of abortions in Virginia in 2017 was 17,210. The number of gun deaths, the misuse of guns, was 1,041. That’s a ratio of 16.5:1. How about this, contrarian? I’m going to impose commonsense restrictions on the constitutional right to an abortion? How about ankle bracelets? I don’t think very many people would agree with that.” Drennan’s campaign website had plenty of lies to spread about abortion, to try and back up that kind of insanity, including the claim that Virginia Democrats had blocked “legislation that would have eliminated restrictions on third-trimester abortions and legalized infanticide.” (Fact check: Out of 200,000 abortions performed in Virginia since the year 2000, only TWO were third trimester, and those were non-viable pregnancies.) Drennan also opposed background checks on firearm purchases, and evaded giving a clear answer on if he supported the Equal Rights Amendment, calling it “dead legislation”. Bill Drennan los with only 38% of the vote against Democrat Suhas Subramanyam in Virginia’s 2019 election.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2017, 2018, 2020, as well as 2021, that “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profiled Iowa State Senator Jason Schultz, who has served in the Iowa state legislature since 2009, spending six years in the lower chambers before moving up to the upper one in the 2014 elections. Back when he was just a member of the Iowa House, Schultz made a name for himself co-sponsoring legislation to try and nullify the Affordable Care Act. What really got our attention about Schultz was his appearance on Mickelson in the Morning back in September of 2015, when he went on a horribly racist rant against Muslim refugees being resettled in the United States from Syria, where he said:

“We already have problems with concentrations of Middle Eastern refugees or migrants coming in and taking over communities. They don’t want to assimilate. They do not want to become Americans. They only want the free stuff from America. They practice a religion that orders them to dominate and they want to live under Sharia law which they will not subordinate under our law while they live here and enjoy our protections and our goodies. It’s an invasion” to spread their own theology by force.”

While Schultz would like to spread paranoid lies about Syrians fleeing their nation for their lives, he supports Personhood and would do anything to save the lives of zygotes. Because they should have Constitutional rights to vote and have gun (while not having a heartbeat yet), and the refugees think they’re entitled to “free stuff”.

His voting record also includes opposition to raising the minimum wage (during the worst period of income inequality in our nation in almost a century), opposition to a ban on gay conversion therapy on minors, and he voted against crimes against individuals based on their gender identity or expression as hate crimes, besides being a big supporter of stricter Voter ID regulations that suppress the vote in the name of preventing statistically non-existent in-person voter fraud. He also sponsored of a bill to try and implement the unconstitutional AND failed conservative policy of drug testing welfare recipients to Iowa. The estimated price tag on implementing such a measure, that always fails to find drug use or any “savings” for the state? $100 million. Well, isn’t that “fiscally conservative” of you, Jason. Way to rack up a nine-figure bill just to shame poor people. Schultz was re-elected 2018 mid-terms, because he was allowed to run unopposed.

In 2019, Schultz insisted there should be work requirements for people on Medicaid, even though many people on Medicaid are literally physically incapable of doing work. With the threat of the coronavirus looming this year, Jason Schultz responded as you might expect… he sponsored legislation that would require public aid recipients to face constant scrutiny for “potential fraud” and have their benefits taken away. Schultz beamed with pride that his pitch had him compared to “Dr. Evil”, and wanted to spend $1.8 million to create an investigated bureau that would try to justify its existence by “proving” a supposed $12 million in imaginary abuse of government programs. It's the sort of soulless conservative extremism one might expect from someone in a leadership position with the policy group ALEC.

Jason Schultz just won re-election on the benefit of only getting a libertarian challenger for his seat, so he’ll be putzing around the Iowa State Senate for another four years so he can do things like try to block schools from mandating children be vaccinated against Covid-19 while spreading misinformation that the vaccines don’t work anyway.

[babyblob]

Meanwhile, the whole Trump Organization, with the whole family is on trial for tax fraud. One person on trial was president. One was a nepotism hire within his White House. The company had taxpayer dollars being funneled through his connections as president, and charging the Secret Service overpriced sums of money to stay at them while serving to protect him. As well as having government employees going out of the way to curry favor by staying at his properties on the dime.

These are all facts the Hunter Biden's Laptop crowd want to forget and ignore.

[Mister Mets]

LOE
(laughing out in exasperation)

FjPGLNsWIAMxw4r.jpg

It's his way to mock the argument.

We have someone doing that right here in this thread.

Really? Whose main defense for what they're doing is claiming that it's technically not illegal?