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

[Mister Mets]

Capitol Rioter apparently running for congress:



https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world...?ocid=msedgntp

Poor WBE.

He also learned that he's running for the wrong congressional district, just in case anyone wasn't a hundred percent sure the guy is a moron.

https://boingboing.net/2021/06/15/ge...political-seat

[BeastieRunner]

He also learned that he's running for the wrong congressional district, just in case anyone wasn't a hundred percent sure the guy is a moron.

https://boingboing.net/2021/06/15/ge...political-seat

Man, I wasn't going to say anything.

I wanted to see him waste his money and not get a single vote.

[Mister Mets]

Man, I wasn't going to say anything.

I wanted to see him waste his money and not get a single vote.

I don't think he's reading the board.

It would probably be significantly better for him if he did. He would at least be more informed on current events.

[numberthirty]

I don't think he's reading the board.

It would probably be significantly better for him if he did. He would at least be more informed on current events.

I get the feeling he isn't reading, period.

[Mister Mets]

I get the feeling he isn't reading, period.

Honestly, I likely overestimated his intelligence when I wrote "He would at least be more informed on current events." which suggests a baseline in which he is at all informed.

[InformationGeek]

Gosar really loves American traitors.

Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), at House hearing, says Capitol police officer was ‘lying in wait’ for Ashli Babbitt before shooting her. Again says Babbitt was “executed” by police, demands name of officer involved in shooting

[The Cool Thatguy]

Gosar really loves American traitors.

And I wonder how many times after a police shooting, he thought 'If he'd just complied...'

[Tami]

Trump's summer tour to kick off with rally against Republican who voted to impeach him

(CNN)Donald Trump has scheduled the first stop on his long-promised revenge tour against Republicans who spurned him during his quest to overturn the 2020 election outcome and subsequent impeachment.

According to a person familiar with the planning, the former President will host his first campaign-style rally in Cleveland on June 26 to support Max Miller, a former Trump administration official and campaign aide who is challenging incumbent GOP Rep. Anthony Gonzalez. The rally marks Trump's first public appearance on behalf of an insurgent Republican candidate -- something party leaders have been dreading from the moment Trump vowed to target GOP incumbents who either voted to impeach him or rejected his false claims of a stolen election.

Gonzalez, a Cleveland native who is seeking reelection for the second time after joining Congress in 2019, is one of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach then-President Trump earlier this year for inciting the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. In addition to attracting a primary challenger, Gonzalez has been censured by Ohio Republican Party leaders and faced calls for his resignation.

In a statement endorsing Miller in February, Trump accused Gonzalez of failing to represent the interests of voters in Ohio's 16th Congressional District, despite Gonzalez's 26-point margin of victory in 2020.

And you know what is likely to happen if there is a Democrat in this race? If Gonzalez wins, Tump/Miller supporters will either stay home and refuse to vote in November and/or claim that the election was rigged.

If Miller wins the Primary, A substantial number of Gonzalez supporters will either stay home (not vote) or vote Democrat.

Depending on the Democratic turnout, this would result in a seat flip from Republican nd to Democrat thanks to Trump's interference.

Of course, I could be wrong, but I think this is reasonable possible scenario.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Trump's summer tour to kick off with rally against Republican who voted to impeach him

This should be mildly entertaining as The Former Guy starts his revenge tour. Meanwhile, regarding Rep. Gonzalez:

In a statement endorsing Miller in February, Trump accused Gonzalez of failing to represent the interests of Donald Trump.

[Tami]

Shoving ensues among press corps covering the summit

Biden and Putin began their summit with the relationship between their countries at its lowest point decades. The same might be true of their respective press corps.

Shoving ensued Wednesday morning as pools of reporters from the United States and Russia sought to enter the villa where the two leaders were meeting.

U.S. and Russian security officials repeatedly told reporters to line up separately and in single file, but that never happened, according to reporters on the scene.

Instead, the journalists pushed and shoved trying to enter the building. There was screaming and yelling as a Swiss official kept asking everyone to be quiet.

Reporters were told several times they would not be allowed inside unless everyone was orderly. But order never materialized.

The two leaders began speaking in the library of the villa without media inside the room. The reporters arrived noisily.

[Tami]

GOP leader vows to make Joe Biden a 'half-term president'

In 2010, as the nation slowly recovered from the Great Recession, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) reflected on his party's top priorities.

"The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president," the Republican leader declared. McConnell added, "Our single biggest political goal is to give our nominee for president the maximum opportunity to be successful."

More than a decade later, another Senate Republican leader, Wyoming's John Barrasso, has articulated an eerily similar vision -- except now, limiting a Democratic president to one whole term is apparently too generous.

"Mitch McConnell's come under a lot of criticism for saying, at one point, he wanted to make sure that Barack Obama was a 'one-term president,'" Barrasso said last Thursday at an event hosted by the Ripon Society, a centrist Republican think tank, which posted the remarks Tuesday. "I want to make Joe Biden a one-half-term president."

It's worth noting that the conservative chair of the Senate Republican Conference did not appear to be referring to a plan to remove Biden from the White House prematurely. Rather, in context, Barrasso was suggesting that if Republicans can retake Congress, the GOP can shut Biden down for the second half of his first term.

At face value, I suspect some will find reports like these mundane. After all, Barrasso is a conservative Republican. Of course he's eager to stand in the way of Democratic governance. It's the same perspective that led McConnell to declare last month that "100 percent" of the Republican Party's focus "is on stopping" the Biden administration.

It's a perspective rooted in the idea that Republicans care about governing and are prepared to work in good faith with Democrats in pursuit of meaningful policy goals.

Barrasso and McConnell have effectively admitted that this is a sham. Republicans don't want to help Biden succeed; they want to make every possible effort to ensure his failure. They don't want to govern; they're desperate to stop Democrats from governing.

[Malvolio]

"Half-term President," eh? So Barrasso wants to impeach Biden, right? Just like so many of them wanted to impeach Obama. But you can't impeach a President just because you don't like him or disagree with him or even if you think his policies will "destroy" America. No, you have to have actual charges of crimes that the President has committed. It should be interesting to see what charges they "trump" up for Biden if it gets to that point.

[Tami]

Woes mount for legal loyalists who pushed Trump’s election conspiracies

A crew of conservative lawyers still pushing disinformation that echoes Donald Trump’s false claim that the election was rigged are now battling federal inquiries, defamation lawsuits and bar association scrutiny that threaten to cripple their legal careers.

Former justice department officials say Trump’s legal loyalists are weakening trust in the American electoral system via persistent repetition of his baseless claims. They note that some are actively backing Republican drives in key states to change election laws seen as undermining voting rights for communities of color.

Take Sidney Powell, a pro-Trump conspiracy promoter and ex-federal prosecutor.

After a short stint on Trump’s legal team last December, where she made wild claims about election fraud due to a voting machine company’s alleged ties to Venezuela, which sparked a $1.3bn defamation lawsuit against her, Powell in late May drew ridicule for telling a Dallas QAnon meeting that Trump could be “reinstated” this summer.

There is also election law veteran Cleta Mitchell, who was on Trump’s infamous January call with Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, where Trump urged him to “find” 11,000-plus votes to block Joe Biden’s win. Mitchell is now leading a $10m FreedomWorks drive in seven states to tighten election laws in ways that are seen as crimping voting rights.

Trump’s high-pressure call led the Fulton county district attorney to open a criminal inquiry.

Meanwhile, Atlanta lawyer L Lin Wood, who worked with Powell in Georgia in a failed drive to reverse Biden’s win by filing baseless lawsuits alleging fraud, told Talking Points Memo he donated $50,000 to help fund a bizarre vote “audit” in Arizona’s largest county – even though Biden’s victory there has been certified.

[Jack Dracula]

"Half-term President," eh? So Barrasso wants to impeach Biden, right? Just like so many of them wanted to impeach Obama. But you can't impeach a President just because you don't like him or disagree with him or even if you think his policies will "destroy" America. No, you have to have actual charges of crimes that the President has committed. It should be interesting to see what charges they "trump" up for Biden if it gets to that point.

The article implies he’s referring to Republicans retaking Congress and the Senate in the mid-terms so they can effectively shut his administration down. Because that’s more important than actually trying to improve things for average Americans.

[Tami]

This is no Onion

Whitmire: Alabama lawmaker wants to ban critical race theory, so I asked him what it is

So what does his bill say?

“It’s pretty simple,” Pringle said. “All it says is you can’t teach critical race theory in K-12 or higher education in the state of Alabama.”

That is a short bill, if not a simple one. But it didn’t answer my question: What is this critical race theory educators would be forbidden to teach? Pringle has seen enough legislation to understand the law requires specificity. Many bills begin by laying out their legal definitions. How would his bill define critical race theory?

“It basically teaches that certain children are inherently bad people because of the color of their skin, period,” Pringle said.

That sounded very serious, indeed. Nazi-like, even. So I asked Pringle if there were any critical race theorists he could point to who have been spreading such toxic garbage?

“Yeah, uh, well — I can assure you — I’ll have to read a lot more,” he said.

I began to get the feeling that Pringle didn’t know as much about critical race theory as I had hoped. Were there other examples he could give me where critical race theory was being put into practice?

“These people, when they were doing the training programs — and the government — if you didn’t buy into what they taught you a hundred percent, they sent you away to a reeducation camp,” Pringle said.

Pringle was a little difficult to follow but this sounded serious. These people — whoever they were— sounded terrifying, and if there were reeducation camps operating in America, that would be big news someone like me should get to the bottom of. I asked Pringle, who were these people?

Pringle is a Realtor, a homebuilder and general contractor and he dug through what he called his “executive suite” (the cab of his pickup truck) looking for an article he’d read. After a few moments of silence, he began to speak again, this time a bit haltingly.

“Here’s an — it doesn’t say who it was, it just says a government that held these — these training sessions …”

Pringle trailed off and I told him that, if he liked, he could send me a link to the article, but then he began to speak again.

“The white male executives are sent to a three-day re-education camp, where they were told that their white male culture wasn’t their —” he trailed off again.

I was worried that we’d lost our connection. These sorts of conversations sometimes end abruptly, but Pringle was still on the line and after a little more hemming and hawing he retreated to a common safe-space of politicians who’ve crawled too far out on a limb: He just wanted to start a conversation, he said.

I introduced a very brief version of the bill to start the conversation, but it’s very difficult in this cancel society to have a frank discussion about racism in this country and this country’s history,” he said. “I mean, history is being rewritten and I’m not exactly sure of the accuracy of what’s there now and what they’re trying to change it into.”