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

[Tami]

The Bonnie and Clyde of MAGA World

The mood that day was celebratory — Trump’s motorcade drove by, and he waved to the adoring throng — but still an air of menace hung over the proceedings. A marker was being put down, there on the streets of the nation’s capital: Joe Biden had lost, and Donald Trump had won, and his victory was being unfairly taken away, and something needed to be done about it. The notion that day that a similar crowd would gather again eight weeks later and lay siege to the Capitol would have seemed fanciful, but not ludicrous.

Stockton and his girlfriend, Jennifer Lawrence, left the hotel and pushed their way through the crowd to the stage, where upon arrival, Stockton stepped up to the microphone, gave a massive Ric Flair-style “Whoooooo!” stepped away from the microphone, then stepped back up, and gave another. “Whoooooooooo!”

Stockton was dressed in a blue and white camouflage button-down shirt. Lawrence, who stood beside him clapping and cheering, was wearing red tights, an American flag belly shirt, a red MAGA hat and a Trump flag draped over her like a cape. “If we let them steal the election from President Trump, we will never get it back!” Stockton told the crowd. “Our freedom is not coming back! We must rise up!”

He talked about the liars and the fake news, and the Big Tech oligarchs who wanted to keep everyone at home on the Internet instead of out here, in the streets. He explained how Trump and the whole MAGA movement was an outgrowth of the tea party revolution from a decade ago. He talked about how they needed to gather offline, just like the original American revolutionaries did. He called on the group to march on the Supreme Court. “Our institutions have been corrupted and weaponized against We the People. And that is what Joe Biden’s agenda is! There is no way that senile old fool beat the hardest working and greatest president ever!”

Then there are Dustin Stockton and Jen Lawrence.

The Jan. 6 rally was, for them, the culmination of work they had been doing for the past decade — work that long predated the election conspiracy, or QAnon, or Donald Trump’s political career. They surfed the waves of a populist tide that grew larger than anyone imagined, one dedicated to tearing down the establishment of both parties and the government itself, replacing it with a government they saw as closer to the people, closer to God, closer to the Constitution.

For years, Stockton and Lawrence had built a career around that movement — as fundraisers, campaign consultants, rally organizers, schemers; engineering ever-more-outlandish media stunts to serve up to an online audience ever more primed to click on them, raising millions in small-dollar donations that relied on Ethernet connections and outrage, taking advantage of loose electioneering laws to give any kind of advantage to favored candidates. They existed on what seemed like the margins of conservative politics until, suddenly, it wasn’t the margins anymore at all.

[Mister Mets]

In a cover story for New York magazine, Jonathan Chait has an interesting theory behind Joe Biden's unpopularity. He thinks the problem isn't that Biden is listening to political activists, or moving to much to the left, but that the donor class is pushing unpopular left-wing ideas.

When confronted with the reality that the Democratic Party is losing Black and Latino moderates, the response on the left is often to treat their views as morally beyond the pale. “Yes, it turns out that a number of people of color, especially those without a college education, can see the allure of the jackboot authoritarian thuggery offered by modern Republicans,” wrote The Nation’s Elie Mystal. “A certain percentage of non-college-educated people are hostile to immigration. Sure. Does that mean Democrats should embrace beating migrants? A certain percentage of non-college-educated people are resistant to science. Sure. Does that mean Democrats should embrace horse dewormer?”

Obviously, nobody is proposing Democrats run on authoritarian thuggery. The question is whether any compromise with the center is acceptable. Obama competed for moderate views by promising that people could keep their private insurance even as he covered those who couldn’t get any coverage, that he would secure the border even as he gave amnesty to Dreamers. Reducing all these spectra of belief to a simple binary, then declaring the opposing position so horrific it cannot be accommodated, is not a political strategy. It is a kind of anti-politics.

This anti-politics did not materialize out of thin air. It is the working assumption of a vast array of progressive nonprofit organizations and the millionaires who fund them. Over the past half-dozen years, several people who work in and around the nonprofit world have told me, the internal political culture at progressive foundations has undergone the same changes that have torn through elite universities, mainstream-media newsrooms, and private schools. An uncompromising version of left-wing political rhetoric has put the leadership of these organizations on the defensive and often prodded them to fund more radical organizations and ideas than before.

These groups have churned out studies and deployed activists to bring left-wing ideas into the political debate. At this they have enjoyed overwhelming success. In recent years, a host of new slogans and plans — the Green New Deal, “Defund the police,” “Abolish ICE,” and so on — have leaped from the world of nonprofit activism onto the chyrons of MSNBC and Fox News. Obviously, the conservative media have played an important role in publicizing (and often distorting) the most radical ideas from the activist left. But the right didn’t invent these edgy slogans; the left did, injecting them into the national bloodstream.

Twitter is often blamed for (or, alternately, credited with) facilitating the rise of the Democratic Party’s left wing. But an important and generally unexamined source of the left’s growth is the left-wing millionaires who finance it. A little more than a decade ago, David Callahan wrote a book, Fortunes of Change, describing a social and political evolution among the American rich. The rise of a knowledge economy had produced a growing class of liberal millionaires and billionaires, and this elite cohort had begun to work its will on the system by forming “a new progressive donor class.”

Gara LaMarche, the former president of the Democracy Alliance, a constellation of progressive groups, told an interviewer in the spring, “The DA’s own strategies have moved several notches to the left as the donor class has as a whole.”

Speaking more generally of other progressive groups, he said, “More of the money is white, and more of the places the money goes to are BIPOC organizations.” Of course, just as the young, college-educated white staff at progressive organizations tend to have far more liberal views than white people as a whole, so do the young, college-educated staff at organizations representing racial minority groups. As both the staff and the donors of the progressive-nonprofit complex have moved left, it has grown increasingly difficult to ground their worldview in a political reality recognizable to most Americans.

Efforts to moderate are criticized as an endorsement of white power, when the Democratic party lost white moderates some time ago.

Yet while most of the official Democratic Party — meaning its elected officials and paid staffers — now agrees that it erred by allowing its brand to be associated with unpopular left-wing ideas, many progressives remain loath to concede the point, noting that the Democrats got their old white moderate and still only managed to eke out a win against a historically unpopular incumbent. Their most common pushback, now as then, is to treat the argument that Democrats need to cater to political moderates as an endorsement of white power. Will Stancil, a progressive researcher and popular left-wing social-media personality, has dismissed calls for heeding public opinion as “a tool for moderate white dudes to argue in defense of the old consensus that moderate white dudes have the most pragmatic politics.” Taifa Smith Butler, president of the progressive think tank Demos, told CNN’s Ron Brownstein that Democrats should focus on “marginalized communities,” rather than “continuing to try to appease white moderates.” The Washington Post’s Perry Bacon Jr. argued, “The idea of White appeasement is certainly not new, even if it is often not acknowledged directly or referred to with a pejorative such as ‘appeasement’ — the term ‘electability’ is often invoked instead, obscuring that the swing voters at issue are almost all White.”

The grim irony is that, in attempting to court non-white voters, Democrats ended up turning them off. It was not only that they got the data wrong — they were also courting these “marginalized communities” in ways that didn’t appeal to them. For the reality is that the Democratic Party’s most moderate voters are disproportionately Latino and Black.

He notes that the party erred in assumptions about Obama's comfortable 2012 reelection, as well as the idea that the reason Hillary lost in 2016 was that progressives weren't motivated enough.

So many of the Democratic Party’s woes can be traced back to a statistical error. After Barack Obama won reelection in 2012, exit polls showed he had prevailed despite losing the white vote by 20 points. The implications were enormous for both parties. Racial minorities were casting a rising share of the vote, reshaping the electorate in ways that seemed to doom the Republican Party and its heavily white coalition. After the election, a Republican autopsy recommended the party move to the center on social issues, including immigration, to win over Latino voters. Democrats, meanwhile, prioritized immigration reform, which they hoped Republicans would have no choice but to cooperate with.

Nearly four years later, Times data analyst Nate Cohn discovered the entire premise of this belief was wrong. Those exit polls turned out to have significantly undercounted the old white working-class share of the electorate. In fact, it was these voters in the upper Midwest who had supplied Obama’s winning margin.

Yet this correction came too late to budge what had become a settled belief across the political spectrum. The Republican Establishment in 2016 bemoaned that in nominating Trump, the party was angering the very constituents it would need to attract. Democrats were convinced their political fate depended on mobilizing the young, socially liberal voters who had fueled Obama’s rise. The 2016 primary featured two Democratic candidates with different theories as to how to energize these voters. Bernie Sanders believed they would turn out to vote en masse for a candidate who promised revolutionary economic change. Hillary Clinton began employing terms and concepts used by academics and embraced by progressive activists. Her campaign tweeted lines like “Flint’s water crisis is an example of the combined effects of intersecting issues that impact communities of color” and “We face a complex, intersectional set of challenges.”

While this lingo may have sounded alien to people without college degrees, it thrilled progressive intellectuals, who saw it as a sign of ideological and cultural affiliation. One Vox story, headlined “Hillary Clinton Said ‘Systemic Racism’ in Tonight’s Speech. That’s Major,” explained that while Obama had “addressed racial divides in his speeches, the term ‘systemic racism,’ embraced in particular by younger activists, was not present in his addresses.” Both Clinton and the media assumed that mobilizing young, non-white voters meant winning the praise of progressive activists and journalists, which in turn meant adopting the language of the seminar.

A wrinkle is that the ways moderate Democrats use to indicate their centrism aren't popular outside the lobbyist class.

The Democratic Party’s centrist wing has assimilated this worldview. It is not an altogether irrational choice. When you are running in politically hostile territory, and when Fox News has branded your party as the enemy of American values, you need some signal to your constituents that you differ from your colleagues. The paradox is that while the sources of the Democratic Party’s battered reputation in much of red America are largely cultural, the only recourse red-state Democrats have come up with is economic. It is telling that one group, Center Forward, which had emerged to run ads praising key Democrats who had broken with Biden, turned out to be a front for the pharmaceutical lobby.

[JB]

He's been charged with 5 counts of first degree intentional homicide, according to police.

Child Is Sixth Victim To Die After Parade Tragedy; Bond Set At $5 Million
https://chicago.cbslocal.com/video/6...arrell-brooks/

He's been officially charged with 5 intentional homicides. The child that lost his life was an 8-year old.

Thankfully city officials in Milwaukee are looking into their bail system and hopefully addressing the pattern of low bail for violent crimes which led to his quick release.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Child Is Sixth Victim To Die After Parade Tragedy; Bond Set At $5 Million
https://chicago.cbslocal.com/video/6...arrell-brooks/

He's been officially charged with 5 intentional homicides. The child that lost his life was an 8-year old.

Thankfully city officials in Milwaukee are looking into their bail system and hopefully addressing the pattern of low bail for violent crimes which led to his quick release.

That ******* had a rap sheet a mile long and should NEVER have been on the streets.

[Gray Lensman]

That ******* had a rap sheet a mile long and should NEVER have been on the streets.

For me the tell is his 3counts of skipping bail. Someone whose rap sheet screams "flight risk" should never have been offered bail in the first place. I don't know if the DA asked for no bail and was denied, or if they were foolish enough to actually offer it, or if the law tied the hands of everyone involved, but something broke down big time.

[babyblob]

For me the tell is his 3counts of skipping bail. Someone whose rap sheet screams "flight risk" should never have been offered bail in the first place. I don't know if the DA asked for no bail and was denied, or if they were foolish enough to actually offer it, or if the law tied the hands of everyone involved, but something broke down big time.

The DA from what I have heard is the one that said they were fine with the 1000 buck bail to start with.

One of the news shows played a clip of a person from the DA's Office say the bail was inappropriately low and the host wondered why they didnt didnt oppose the low bail then.

[Mister Mets]

Child Is Sixth Victim To Die After Parade Tragedy; Bond Set At $5 Million
https://chicago.cbslocal.com/video/6...arrell-brooks/

He's been officially charged with 5 intentional homicides. The child that lost his life was an 8-year old.

Thankfully city officials in Milwaukee are looking into their bail system and hopefully addressing the pattern of low bail for violent crimes which led to his quick release.

I understand the argument for bail reform, and the idea that bail should not be a punishment. But the release of this maniac appears to be a catastrophic overcorrection.

[Gray Lensman]

I understand the argument for bail reform, and the idea that bail should not be a punishment. But the release of this maniac appears to be a catastrophic overcorrection.

Even a place that has abolished bail should be able to recognize that someone who has failed to appear 3 times is a flight risk.

[worstblogever]

Bestselling author Don Winslow has 19 Questions About Jan. 6th that... honestly, it's shocking it's been almost a year and we don't have the answers to these yet.

The video hit 1 million views in under 6 hours after being posted, more rolling in.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2014, "Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day" ran a profile of Roger Rivard, a former Wisconsin state legislator who after receiving an endorsement from none other than current House Speaker Paul Ryan back in the 2010 elections, managed to get himself elected to office where he became a key ally of Gov. Scott Walker, voting for legislation like stricter Voter ID laws, lifting restrictions on mining safety, and to try to lift the ban on hunting gray wolves, even though that could lead to the species’ extinction. When protesters began to assemble in Madison to protest the Wisconsin GOP’s agenda, Rivard was quoted as calling them “terrorists”. That was far from his most egregiously appalling quote, however, as in December of 2011, Rivard was involved in a debate over the state’s “Romeo and Juliet” laws, he said that “as long as sex is consensual, it’s not rape”, which shows a rather poor understanding of statutory rape law. While at first, the media somehow missed the true weight of that quote, during the buildup to the 2012 elections, journalists really started doing digging into any member of the GOP who felt the need to wax poetic about rape. So they followed up with Rivard, who defended his previous discussions on the subject with an anecdote about the advice his father gave him growing up about girls agreeing consensual sex and then having remorse and calling it rape the next day, or as he put it…. “Some girls just rape easy.” Needless to say, after that Rivard was not elected to a second term, and both Paul Ryan and Scott Walker pretended he never heard of the guy after that.


In 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” posted profiles of Elaine Morgan, a Rhode Island State Senator and dry cleaner who only seemed like as kooky as the average conservative at first when she voted against the state of Rhode Island’s attempt to raise the minimum wage, in the midst of its worst period of income inequality in the United States in almost a century, despite in her own words that she thinks the people know “MONEY WORKS BEST IN OUR POCKETS”. But what really got our attention was Morgan’s response to a letter from a constituent who was angry about the idea that the United States would potentially allow Syrian refugees to seek refuge and potentially emigrate to the United States, sending them a horribly Islamophobic response while accidentally CC’ing EVERY MEMBER OF THE STATE LEGISLATURE. Her inflammatory and disgusting take read, ”I do not want our governor bringing in any Syrian refugees. I think our country is under attack. I think this is a major plan by these countries to spread out their people to attack all non Muslim persons .The Muslim religion and philosophy is to murder, rape, and decapitate anyone who is a non Muslim. If we need to take these people in we should set up a refugee camp to keep them segregated from our populous. I think the protection of our US citizens and the United States of America should be the most important issue here.” When asked about her e-mail the next day, she didn’t apologize, and continued to suggest internment camps as an option, saying, “We have veterans in the streets starving, alcoholics, drug addicts. I can see taking Syrian refugees in, but keeping them all centralized – it sounds a little barbaric, but we need to centralize them and keep them in one central area.”

In 2017, Elaine Morgan co-sponsored an unsuccessful attempt to pass a law to drug test welfare recipients. You know, one of those kinds that lose a state a ton of money on the cost of drug testing, that then find that almost statistically no one if on drugs so no savings are found in booting people off of government assistance, and the law really only exists to shame poor people for asking for help in the first place. At least, that’s the initial money lost. States then get the opportunity to lose millions of dollars in lawsuits where the laws, if passed, get overturned as violations of the 4th Amendment that protects citizens from illegal search and seizures without cause. Point being, Morgan’s an idiot for even suggesting such a thing, and thankfully the Democratic majority voted down her attempt.

And, in an extremely depressing turn of events… the Rhode Island GOP did not find anyone to challenge Elaine Morgan for her seat on the Rhode Island State Senate in 2020, thus she again got her party’s nomination unopposed, before going on to barely survive defeat Democrat Jennifer Douglas with 54% of the vote.

She thus has been allowed to hang around the Rhode Island legislature where she pretends parliamentary rules are being violated when she can’t get her way and kill legislation that she doesn’t like, such as pro-choice bills. Morgan impotently votes against bills as obviously necessary as a minimum wage increase, or to ban the manufacture of untraceable “ghost guns” in Rhode Island.

However, we’re not sure that she’s going to have an easy path to re-election the next time her seat is up in 2022. First off, we have to point out that Elaine Morgan has posted on Facebook that the attack on the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, was a “staged riot” that was carried out by “leftists”, showing she’s… pretty reality-challenged. The second reason being, she’s going to have to reconcile the fact that while she’s been busy impotently being a regressive in her state legislature, she perhaps should have been keeping an eye on her son, who in March 2021 was charged with the sexual assault of a 14 year old girl.


Either thing could end the career of any other politician. Both will likely be her undoing, and we’ll be watching to see if she opts to not run for re-election in 2022.

[Tami]

Trump met with Rittennhouse. I bet Trump is going to offer him a job.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Trump met with Rittennhouse. I bet Trump is going to offer him a job.

To be sure. And that's after Rittenhouse was schmoozed by Tucker Carlson the other day. That snotnosed little punk is quickly becoming a hero to the right wing/conservative set. Revolting.

[Tami]

To be sure. And that's after Rittenhouse was schmoozed by Tucker Carlson the other day. That snotnosed little punk is quickly becoming a hero to the right wing/conservative set. Revolting.

Speaking of which

Marjorie Taylor Greene bill would award Congressional Gold Medal to Kyle Rittenhouse

'Eye Roll Please'

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is sponsoring a bill that would award the Congressional Gold Medal to Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed two people in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Greene introduced HR6070 on Tuesday "[t]o award a Congressional Gold Medal to Kyle H. Rittenhouse, who protected the community of Kenosha, Wisconsin, during a Black Lives Matter (BLM) riot on August 25, 2020."

Full text of the legislation was not immediately available.

Donald Trump Jr. has also suggested that his father, who is not president, award a presidential medal to Rittenhouse.v

[4saken1]

To be sure. And that's after Rittenhouse was schmoozed by Tucker Carlson the other day. That snotnosed little punk is quickly becoming a hero to the right wing/conservative set. Revolting.

He became a hero of the right wing the day he killed 3 people at a BLM protest.

[Xheight]

To be sure. And that's after Rittenhouse was schmoozed by Tucker Carlson the other day. That snotnosed little punk is quickly becoming a hero to the right wing/conservative set. Revolting.

Would he be welcome back at his University? Or where? People have made up their minds as to what he was doing there and that is going to limit his life choices, it is another by product of our ever intolerant society.

He became a hero of the right wing the day he killed 3 people at a BLM protest.

Case and point - the reductive nature of such statements doesn't allow for anything but the political reality.