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

[numberthirty]

No one’s saying they’re these shining paragons of integrity or that they’re completely immune to bad faith or any form of intellectual myopia (by GOD, they aren’t). Still, they have a noticeable degree more scruples than the GOP, as of late. At the very least, moving adjacent (not even getting in bed) with them seems less tantamount to suicide, from where I’m standing.

If your saying that they are not attempting to slit their figurative throat with the same sort of regularity that Republicans are?

Sure. Agreed.

That reality does not somehow magically make the idea that Dems are about accountability any less laughable.

Never mind the particular instance being brought up.

[numberthirty]

I honestly get the feeling that Andy Kaufman pulled a fast one some of the time...

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5...rbits-to-fight

Gohmert asks if federal agencies can change Earth's or moon's orbits to fight climate change

[BeastieRunner]

I honestly get the feeling that Andy Kaufman pulled a fast one some of the time...

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5...rbits-to-fight

Only if he flies there and does him himself.

[Tami]

Future-proofing the presidency

Donald Trump brought our democracy to the brink and exposed its weak spots. How to thwart the next American tyrant.

[AnakinFlair]

I honestly get the feeling that Andy Kaufman pulled a fast one some of the time...

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5...rbits-to-fight

Sure. All we have to do is shoot it with the Jewish Space Laser.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Future-proofing the presidency

That was a damn good article. Safeguards MUST be put in place IMMEDIATELY, because you can bet the house the next Qpublican as corrupt as Trump but smarter than Dolt45 will certainly push the envelope should he win the presidency.

[worstblogever]

It was on this date in 2015 that "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" had a profile of former Montana House of Representatives member Jerry O’Neil, a man who prior to entering politics, was being investigated for practicing law without a license, but soldiered on by outspending the entire $2000 budget of the Montana Supreme Court’s Commission on the Unauthorized Practice of Law. Eventually, though, O’Neil would (What else?) begin a political career is a Montana state legislator, where he stood out by trying to draft bills that would allow for people sentenced to prison to commute their sentences by instead agreeing to corporal punishment, such as large quantities of canings or spankings (really) and his demand that his legislative salary should be paid in gold, like the Constitution intended (there’s no mention of state legislators being paid in gold). O’Neil ended up being beaten in the 2014 elections by Democrat Zac Perry, and has apparently decided to call it a career, at least for now.

On this date in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, as well as 2020, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day posted profiles of the current U.S. House Representative for Wisconsin’s 7th District, Sean Duffy, a former contestant on MTV’s reality show “The Real World” where he would spend one episode gyrating in his underwear for his housemates. Duffy was yet another beneficiary of the Tea Party Wave, storming into office to replace twenty-one term Congressman Dave Obey back in 2010, and if you ask Sean Duffy, it’s a real struggle to survive on the measly $174,000 salary he gets as a member of Congress, to which some might advise him that he should have stopped having kids sometime before his ninth. Hypocritically, while refusing a pay cut on his own six figure salary, Duffy advises other public workers should accept pay cuts. Of course, with 8 children, it comes as little surprise that Sean Duffy is also a die-hard pro-life supporter. In January of 2016, however, he caused an uproar on the floor of the U.S. House after he decided to express that anti-abortion fervor during a discussion about the BlackLivesMatter Movement by presenting inaccurate statistics to chastise the Congressional Black Caucus for not supporting black lives because they allow higher abortion rates racially than whites. That’s not only statistically incorrect but totally racist. Congresswoman Gwen Moore perhaps responded best that, “It’s painfully obvious that Representative Duffy’s concern for life ends as soon as the umbilical cord is cut.” But Duffy doesn’t always act like he knows it all, like the time he was asked at a town hall about his position on trans-vaginal ultrasounds, and he dodged the question by saying, “Well, I haven’t had one.” Of course, either quote could have been a worse statement… like the time Sean Duffy’s wife, and fellow “Real World” alumni Rachel Campos-Duffy compared abortion to slavery and the Holocaust, as Republicans are frequently in the habit of doing. During the 2016 election, Duffy embraced authoritarian fascism in full, encouraging Donald Trump use his Twitter account to “push back against the media” regarding negative stories about his transition team (which considering they were all talking to Russians, it’s a good thing it didn’t work). Within two weeks, Duffy was on CNN, where in an interview with CNN he was being asked why Donald Trump took WEEKS to condemn Neo-Nazis who began a spree of hate crime assaults, vandalism, and threats against minorities to “celebrate” Trump’s election, Duffy tried changing the topic by claiming that the Neo-Nazis were similar to the Black Lives Matter movement. Only a few weeks after that in December of 2016, Duffy was being interviewed by Tucker Carlson, when he claimed that the city of Madison, Wisconsin, one of the few liberal bastions in the state what with the University of Wisconsin there, was “communist”. After he was widely criticized for this stupid, stupid remark, Duffy played the victim by getting on Twitter to post, ”The PC crowd is humorless. For those offended by my ‘communist’ comment, I'll send a therapy dog to your ‘safe place’ of choice in Madison.”[ Duffy was on the Trump transition team (no word on if they trusted him to talk to Russians) but the real shock from Sean Duffy came in February of 2017, when he began arguing that the media was deliberately not reporting Islamic terror attacks (ones that they actually HAD reported on), Duffy started trying to claim that white terrorism didn’t exist, and even if it does, it wasn’t the same thing as Islamic terrorism because it has a “bright side”. He did this while embarrassing himself while arguing in defense of Donald Trump’s attempted Muslim ban in a CNN interview with Alisyn Camerota: We can’t even begin with how ignorant that whole conversation is regarding the differences between White Nationalist terrorism and Muslim terrorism, but we’ll add that the man who shot Gabby Giffords was also not a Marxist, as Duffy lied about. Duffy got his ass handed to him again in a discussion about Donald Trump’s proposed border wall on CNN in February of 2019, where he claimed that somehow people crossing the U.S./Mexico border were responsible for people in Wisconsin “dying from meth” and heroin overdoses. Duffy resigned from office in August of 2019, citing a need to “spend more time with his family”, which for once might be true because he has almost as many kids as he has fingers at this point, and not just the excuse Republicans covering up a scandal they’re in on the side say. He is now, predictably, serving as a lobbyist on K Street. As such, we will set aside we’ll set aside his profile at this time to take a look at a different wacky Republican today instead. (Current crazy/stupid scoreboard, is now 992-50, since this was established in July 2014.


Darlene Swaffar

Welcome to what is the 992nd profile here at “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day”, where we’ll be profiling Darlene Swaffar, a 2020 candidate for office in Florida’s 22nd Congressional District, and yes, the latest in our long line of “Qanon conspiracy theorists who tried to get elected to Congress”. Swaffar was repeatedly tagging posts with the QAnon slogan, and was pushing a way-out-there idea about Donald Trump’s Twitter posts and the life of Founding Father Benjamin Franklin being related to “Q” as “the 17th letter of the alphabet.” On her personal Facebook page, it was a barrage of Qanon memes and she made a video of herself taking an oath supporting QAnon. In April 2019, she wrote on a Facebook page called “QAnon Great Awakening” that the page’s posts about QAnon inspired her to run for office and that she had supposedly “met with the Republican party in South Florida and have received their endorsement”.

Darlene Swaffar ended up finishing fourth out of four GOP Primary candidates in 2020, getting a mere 8% of the vote. Don’t look now, but this Q-kook is filing to run again in 2022, where she’ll be likely to lose against her GOP cohorts or should she pull the upset, Democratic Congressman Ted Deutch in the general election, thinking that attacking him for his vote to impeach Donald Trump for inciting a violent coup attempt on Congress is somehow going to rally people behind her.

Yeah, don’t see that happening. Especially because Darlene Swaffar is palling around with pardoned fellow conspiracy theorist Michael Flynn, and currently promoting conspiracy theories about Covid-19 being created in a lab in Wuhan, China, and deliberately being released on the populace, as well as that “Critical Race Theory was created by Racist Marxists”.

She… she needs some help.

[Tami]

I honestly get the feeling that Andy Kaufman pulled a fast one some of the time...

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5...rbits-to-fight

A number of people on Twitter responded that Gohmert was being 'Sarcastic'. I wonder if that is in the same way that Trump used to be 'Joking' when he said things like injecting yourself with bleach.

[Tami]

How many oceans are there on Earth? National Geographic now says five.

For the first time in the more than 100 years that the National Geographic Society has mapped the world’s oceans, it will recognize five of them. The organization announced this week that it will recognize the Southern Ocean, a body of water that encircles Antarctica, as the world’s fifth.

“Scientists have long known there’s a distinct ecological region around Antarctica,” National Geographic Society geographer Alex Tait said in an interview. But at least in the international scientific community, there hasn’t been agreement on the name and boundary of this body of water.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) officials said the federal agency recognized the body as the fifth ocean in 1999, when the U.S. Board on Geographic Names approved the name “Southern Ocean.”

[Ragged Maw]

How many oceans are there on Earth? National Geographic now says five.

Oh it was a lingering disagreement that was around even before “current issues”. I’m relieved. Was worried that this ocean may have been just recently born using water “borrowed” from the polar ice caps. <tugs collar nervously>

[WestPhillyPunisher]

A number of people on Twitter responded that Gohmert was being 'Sarcastic'. I wonder if that is in the same way that Trump used to be 'Joking' when he said things like injecting yourself with bleach.

Pfft! Gomer Gohmert couldn't spell sarcasm, much less practice it. Dude's a stone moron who meant every damn word he said.

[Tami]

My Fellow Republicans, Stop Fearing This Dangerous and Diminished Man

When Donald Trump, the patron saint of sore losers, appeared at a Republican event on Saturday night and compared the 2020 election to a “third-world-country election like we’ve never seen before,” it wasn’t just another false rant from the former president. His words also described his attempted subversion of democracy in the run-up to the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.

Consider Mr. Trump’s remarks at his rally just before the attack: “If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election,” he said. “All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify and we become president.”

Or consider Mr. Trump’s harassment of Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, with the request to “find” him votes, or his relentless harassment of other election officials and governors.

Many Republicans want to move on from the Jan. 6 attack. But how is that possible when the former president won’t move on from the Nov. 3 election and continues to push the same incendiary lies that resulted in 61 failed lawsuits before Jan. 6, led to an insurrection and could lead to yet more violence?

If you doubt that a threat of violence exists, look at the recent poll from the Public Religion Research Institute and the Interfaith Youth Core, which shows that a dangerous QAnon conspiracy theory is believed by 15 percent of our fellow Americans — including almost one in four Republicans, 14 percent of independents and even 8 percent of Democrats.

Republicans, instead of opposing a commission to investigate the events of Jan. 6, need to be at the forefront of seeking answers on the insurrection and diminishing the power of QAnon and the other conspiracy theories that Mr. Trump has fueled. While he is still popular within the party, Mr. Trump is a diminished political figure: 66 percent of Americans now hope he won’t run again in 2024, including 30 percent of Republicans. He is not the future, and Republicans need to stop fearing him. He will continue to damage the party if we don’t face the Jan. 6 facts head-on.

[wjowski]

Future-proofing the presidency

Simple solution to that; have the president be selected by the House+Senate. This has it's own flaws obviously, but I guarantee Trump would have gotten nowhere near the White House with it.

[Gray Lensman]

A number of people on Twitter responded that Gohmert was being 'Sarcastic'. I wonder if that is in the same way that Trump used to be 'Joking' when he said things like injecting yourself with bleach.

Ah, the Schrodinger's Douchebag ploy. Was the comment a joke or not? We have to wait for the public reaction to be sure.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

My Fellow Republicans, Stop Fearing This Dangerous and Diminished Man

I've said this before: It isn't Trump Qpublicans fear, it's his deranged and fanatically devoted base, a base more loyal to him than to the party, a full blown lunatic fringe who's support the GQP desperately needs for votes going into 2022. Without that support, Qpublicans are dead in the water.