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

[Odd Rödney]

And there will still be people who won't vote for Biden because he isn't exciting them or because he isn't for Medicare for All or because of something he said twenty years ago.

Which is crazy, considering the stakes.

[Kuro no Shinigami]

And there will still be people who won't vote for Biden because he isn't exciting them or because he isn't for Medicare for All or because of something he said twenty years ago.

Exactly. That is why the polls couple of weeks from the Election Day are meaningless. There are undecided Democrats, undecided Republicans and undecided Independents who still haven't made their minds and will make a decision at the last minute.

The economy is in a slump. The pandemic is raging. The climate change is getting worse. And the idiotic and irresponsible behavior of the POTUS is making America look like a fool and laughingstock to the rest of the world.

Trump is unpopular with liberals but still remains popular with the conservatives due to his anti-immigration stance. There are some Blue collar workers who believe his promises of reviving the economy. Most cops, who are fed up with the BLM, will likely vote for Trump.

Mr. Bolton's recent statement disputing the article's claim of Trump's disparaging anti-military remarks doesn't help Mr. Biden well.

[Kirby101]

Bolton did not dispute it. He said he didn't hear it but it sounded like something Trump would say.

[JackDaw]

And there will still be people who won't vote for Biden because he isn't exciting them or because he isn't for Medicare for All or because of something he said twenty years ago.

I’m sceptical about that.

That may be the vocalised reasons...ones that appear semi-respectable.

But surely the massive majority of people that don’t vote for Joe B will do so because deep down they like what the Donald is doing.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

This is more important to me after watching a video of Trump meeting with officials in California. Trump told them the Earth will get cooler very soon. A man said "I wish science could agree with you." Trump's comeback? "Science doesnt know everything."

Wow! But I dont know why I am so surprised at this point.

Short and sweet: Anything, and I do mean ANYTHING that doesn’t fit into Trump’s narrative is wrong. Nothing more complicated than that.

[worstblogever]

In 2014, and in 2015, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" published profiles of Joe Miller, a former U.S. Senate candidate from Alaska who believes that the minimum wage and unemployment benefits are unconstitutional, wanted the 17th Amendment of the Constitution repealed, opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest, paid campaign consultants who were involved in gay conversion therapy clinics, allied himself with militia groups who marched to support his campaign with assault rifles, and had his own security team try and arrest journalists for asking questions he didn’t like. He also was later revealed to have been paranoid enough to wear a bulletproof vest on the campaign trail, and spent the next four years complaining about Democrats in ways to further establish that, including by saying President Obama was in league with the Muslim Brotherhood. Miller has moved on to become a conservative radio talk show host in Alaska who gives a platform to some of the nuttiest kooks in hard-right politics to come on his show. Whether it's anti-immigrant lies from Joe Arpaio and Kris Kobach, anti-Muslim conspiracy theories from Walid Shoebat, or anti-gay propaganda from any number of representatives of the Family Research Council, Miller is there to not only fail to challenge any insane claim made on his show, but to add more fuel to the fires of hatred. Joe Miller did not run for office in 2016, and may finally have given up his dreams for elected office.

On this date in 2016, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" featured a profiled Carlos Beruff, a candidate for U.S. Senate from Florida summed up as "The Little Trump of Florida". His candidacy was a comedy of errors, frankly. While Beruff is believed to be a U.S. citizen born to immigrant parents in Florida, a voter registration form from his home in Manatee County, Florida surfaced where he entered that he was born in Cuba.So only six weeks or so into his campaign, Beruff's got to discuss how that was all just an honest mistake, and he didn't willfully misreport information on a voter registration form because hey... that's a third-degree felony and punishable by up to a $5,000 fine and five years in prison. The Trump comparisons really came because Beruff was notoriously brash, and furiously anti-immigrant (even though his parents were immigrants) and called for a ban for ANY entry by ANYONE from the Middle East into the United States, at all. The point w here Carlos Beruff crossed a line even Trump hadn't, though, is when he called President Obama an "animal", repeatedly in a speech at a county GOP meeting in April of 2016, and claimed that Obama had "destroyed our country and our military". And wouldn't you know it? Beruff refused to apologize for those remarks, at all. In fact, when Democratic Congressman Patrick Murphy called upon Beruff to apologize for that, and his other bigotry, Beruff practically tripled down, when he didn't just refuse to say he was sorry, but demand Murphy apologize for "aiding Barack Obama in making America weaker". Beruff was a terrible candidate to an extent that the Florida GOP begged Marco Rubio to renege on his promise to not run for re-election, and against Rubio, managed to get all of 18% of the vote in the primary.

On this date in 2017, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" featured a profiled Todd Wilcox, a former CIA Operative and Green Beret, multi-millionaire, and candidate for U.S. Senate in Florida in 2016. At first, Todd Wilcox seemed like an intriguing candidate in the race to replace Marco Rubio, while he was running for president in 2016, and he was even endorsed by a key advisor to the Donald Trump presidential campaign, General Michael Flynn (which these days isn't as much of a proud endorsement). But there were some pretty big flaws about Wilcox as a candidate, and not just in some of the misdemeanor criminal activity he committed in his youth. You see, Todd Wilcox was more known in the CIA during the Bush administration, and he was rather set in his ways about policies that were being used at the time. Frankly, Todd Wilcox flat out believed that waterboarding works. This is contradictory to the reports released from within the CIA that "enhanced interrogation" techniques garnered no actionable intelligence that were read by people in the U.S. Senate during the Obama administration, and that those findings were released to the public. Wilcox gave his humble opinion that "Social Security is a Ponzi scheme", and talked about getting rid of it. Which, of all the states to play that card… FLORIDA? Spoiler alert… Wilcox did not win office.

On this date in 2018, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profiled Adam Putnam, the former Florida Commissioner of Agriculture and Consumer Services from 2011-2018, and a former a two-term member of the Florida House of Representatives before he was a five-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida’s 12th Congressional District from 2001 through 2010 after being first sworn in back at the age of 26. Putnam sought to be the Governor of Florida in 2018, to follow Voldemort’s stunt double himself, Gov. Rick Scott in that role. After all, he learned a lot from Scott, like how to violate the state’s transparency laws and having to settle out of court for doing so. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves and first discuss Putnam’s career as a legislator… as a member of the Florida state legislature in 1999, Adam Putnam just happened to sponsor legislation that made himself and his family’s citrus farm somewhere in the range of $25 million over several years. Once he got to Congress… during his decade long tenure, Putnam managed to miss more than double the average amount of votes. And when you look back upon some of the worst bits of policy from the Bush years, and first two years of the Obama administration, he’s right there leaving his mark on some of the most detrimental ideas conservatives could come up with, including his support of the Terry Schiavo Incapacitated Persons Protection Bill, a votes for a resolution towards creating a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, and votes against ENDA, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the DREAM Act, the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", and failed to show up to vote for the Zadroga Bill, to provide healthcare for first responders from 9/11. Putnam would take a step back from a career in Washington, D.C. to return to Florida and take a job working as Florida’s Secretary of Agriculture as a means of escaping an ethics scandal where Putnam was earmarking $100,000 in funds towards an abscission chemical that would again benefit his family’s citrus farm and use his new connections to hide the fact that his family’s business was violating labor laws (for about seven-and-a-half years, anyway). Well, that bit of scandal was something biting Adam Putnam on the arse after he announced his gubernatorial campaign, but then, a far more egregious one broke… One of the focal points of Putnam’s office as Commissioner of Agriculture and Consumer Services is… consumer services includes gun sales. And a responsibility of Putnam’s offices was to perform the mandatory background checks for gun permits. And wouldn’t you know it… for a 13 month period, nary a single background checks on firearm permits was performed, and Putnam and company just handed them out willy-nilly because FLORIDA. Okay, the excuse wasn’t actually “FLORIDA”. The excuse was that the one employee who worked for Putnam in charge of processing the background checks forgot his password to log onto the FBI’s crime database. We would laugh, but the idea that hundreds of guns went into the hands of people who may or may not be criminal psychopaths is just terrifying enough to make it not funny. Also, that story about the guy forgetting his password MIGHT be bulls***, because the actual whistleblower who reported Putnam wasn’t doing his due diligence and performing background checks in the interests of public safety was told back in 2013 that “she worked for the NRA” and was tasked with pushing through 75 gun permits DAILY. She sued, and the state of Florida settled for $10,000, plus another $20,000 for her legal fees. Okay, so trying to blame deliberate negligence on one employee forgetting his password and never bothering to call the FBI and get it reset… that wasn’t plausible. So how did Adam Putnam correct the record? He started admitting he was an “NRA Sellout”, and started campaigning as if that was a GOOD thing. We’re serious. The good news we have at the end of this story is, Adam Putnam lost the primary to Ron DeSantis, because of course the news can get worse.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2019, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profiled Melissa Howard, a 2018 candidate for the Florida House of Representatives for a seat in District 73 of that body, who actually was getting a little support and promotion from Republican financer Carlos Beruff. Her campaign didn’t even make it to the primary though, and we never got to learn much about her position on this issues… because she had one of the most embarrassing lies in politics of all of 2018, and that’s saying something in the Trump era. You see, Melissa Howard and her husband lead a comfortable life running the International Medical Expo and Market Place, and she originally dreamed of being on a spinoff of Real Housewives, or some sort of reality show. But when that didn’t happen, she figured a political career was her next ticket to fame. Noble reason for entering public service, right? Anyway, she was already establishing a confrontational relationship with the local media, when the man she was challenging in the GOP Primary for a seat in the state legislature, Tommy Gregory, accused Howard about lying about having a college degree from he University of Miami of Ohio. Reporters, already having seen Howard pull a “fake news” act when they discussed even the most trivial of things about her, couldn’t find any record of her having a degree either. Which prompted Melissa Howard to fly to Ohio to go digging with her mother to pull her diploma out of storage, and post a photo of herself with it online and tell Tommy Gregory to “stop the lies”. There was just one problem… the diploma in the photo was easily broken down as a phony. A day after Melissa Howard promised to stay in the race anyway amidst the controversy, she dropped out. Because she unwittingly committed a misdemeanor by faking her diploma like that, and had to serve probation as a result. We’re pretty sure her career in politics is over before it really started, but on the bright side, now she’ll have more time to focus on becoming a reality TV star. As such, we will set aside her profile at this time, and take a look at another wacky Republican today instead. (Current crazy/stupid scoreboard, is now 914-45, since this was established in July 2014.


Jason Saine
Welcome to what is the 914th original profile here at “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day”, where we’ll be discussing Jason Saine, who has represented District 97 in the North Carolina House of Representatives since… you guessed it, the 2010 Tea Party Wave. And while we’ve covered many a Republican in the North Carolina State legislature during the nine hundred plus entries on this blog, we took particular notice of Jason Saine about a year ago after the chicanery pulled by the NCGOP to get their idea of a state budget passed. Republicans around the capitol in Charlotte made a lot of noise about honoring the 18th anniversary of 9/11, scheduling the legislature to take the morning off. Democrats within the state legislature were also on board with respecting those fallen on that dark day by taking the morning off to have a moment of remembrance…

And then the mother***ing Republicans showed up at the capitol when they said they'd be remembering 9-11 victims, declared they had enough people present for a quorum, and started passing a veto-proof budget bill against the protests of what few Democrats were at work. It was a brazen and perverse rebuke of American democracy done by abusing the empathy Democrats had towards the concept of showing respect for the deceased. But Jason Saine wasn’t content to just get the veto-proof budget Republicans wanted to the desk of Gov. Roy Cooper, he stood out among the absolute f***ery for dropping this quote:

”As a former firefighter and an American, I am appalled that anyone in our country would stop going about their normal business on this day. When we stop being a beacon of freedom, hope and democracy, then the terrorists win.”

One might think that someone so adverse to democratic normalcy would perhaps have some issues with corruption of other kinds… and it seems that might be the case, as a North Carolina watchdog group blew the whistle on the number of times that Saine, a prolific fundraiser, has voted in synch with the interests of his campaign donors right after they give him money. On 23 occasions, he has submitted legislation that appeared to directly written for the purpose of benefiting those who filled his coffers.

And his voting record? Think about some of the worst legislation to come out of the Tar Heel State since the Tea Party Wave ten years ago. Guess what? Jason Saine has supported almost all of those:

• June 5th, 2012: Saine votes against HB 947, a bill to compensate victims of forced sterilization by eugenics programs in North Carolina decades earlier.
• August 2nd, 2012: Saine votes for HB 819, a bill to ban all research on the impacts of climate change upon the North Carolina coastline.
• April 11th, 2013: Jason Saine votes for HB 392, another of those insane GOP bills that seek to drug test welfare recipients, then lose a state a ton of money on the cost of drug testing only to find no significant drug use until lawsuits against the laws succeed to prove the law is a violation of the 4th Amendment rights of those it seeks to test.
• June 5th, 2013: Saine votes for the Repeal of the Racial Justice Act.
• July 11th, 2013: Jason Saine votes for SB 353, an extremely restrictive anti-abortion bill that was amended by the North Carolina GOP from a motorcycle safety bill into an anti-choice measure.
• July 25th, 2013: Saine votes for HB 589, one of several “stricter Voter ID laws” North Carolina Republicans push during hIS tenure aimed at suppressing the vote.
• June 3rd, 2015: Jason Saine votes for HB 465, a TRAP law aimed at creating abortion regulations so restrictive that they would effectively force the closure of all abortion clinics in the state for failing to be able to meet them.
• June 11th, 2015: Saine votes for SB 2, a bill to allow state officials to refuse to perform “certain marriage duties” if they have a “sincerely held” religious objection.
• July 21st, 2015: Responding to the South Carolina state legislature voting to remove the Confederate flag from their state capitol after the mass murder of nine African Americans at the historical Charleston AME Church, Jason Saine is one of several North Carolina Republicans who vote for SB 22, and to make it harder to remove Confederate monuments in North Carolina.
• March 23rd, 2016: Saine votes for HB 2, North Carolina’s disastrous anti-LGBTQ law, and boycotts over the law cost the state well over a trillion dollars of revenue from business boycotts and the tourism industry.

Jason Saine is running for a sixth term in office in 2020, and faces Democrat Greg McBryde in that matchup. Hopefully he doesn’t call him a terrorist between now and November. His district leans very conservative, so it seems more likely that he’ll be tripped up in an ethics scandal or choose to retire rather than be voted out of office. And considering the reports are that he’s living the high life on campaign funding, that won’t happen soon enough.

[Tami]

UPDATE

— Caputo has signaled his desire to take medical leave
— He claimed to staff he had never read a single MMWR, despite efforts to meddle w reports
— He concluded meeting by telling staff to listen to the Grateful Dead

Twitter Link

Caputo apologizes to HHS staff, signals desire for medical leave

The health department's top spokesperson Michael Caputo called an emergency staff meeting on Tuesday to apologize for drawing negative attention to the Trump administration's health care strategy and signaled that he might be soon departing his role, according to five people with knowledge of the meeting.

The departure of Caputo, who has closely controlled the health agencies' dissemination of information about coronavirus, would be a blow to the Trump administration's efforts to promote a possible vaccine, if one is approved in the fall.

Caputo told staffers that his series of false accusations on Facebook Live this weekend — which included unfounded allegations that the Centers for Disease Control was harboring a “resistance unit” — reflected poorly on HHS’ communications office. He blamed his recent behavior on a combination of physical health issues and the toll of fielding death threats against his family. Caputo also acknowledged that he had never read one of the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, despite his team's ongoing efforts to try to edit those documents.

Caputo told staff that he is scheduled to meet with HHS Secretary Alex Azar later Tuesday, the people with knowledge of the meeting said.

[The Cool Thatguy]

Twitter Link

Caputo apologizes to HHS staff, signals desire for medical leave

Oh thank God. Someone in the Trump administration still has some shame.

[worstblogever]

Oh thank God. Someone in the Trump administration still has some shame.

We have been using the Oompa Loompa whistle less in 2020 than we did in 2017-2019.

Looking forward to a massive musical number on Nov. 3rd, 4th, and one more time on Jan. 20th.

[GindyPosts]

And there will still be people who won't vote for Biden because he isn't exciting them or because he isn't for Medicare for All or because of something he said twenty years ago.

I'm all for expanding Medicare but we can't just point to European countries and go "let's do what they do". They mostly have good health care thanks to a willingness and a devotion towards paying for it. America was effectively founded on the principle of not paying for anything.

I'm also sure Biden will be convinced somehow to soften that stance. Regardless, everyone acting like he's some left wing kook when his career and policies mostly lean moderate are amazing to behold.

[Gray Lensman]

We have been using the Oompa Loompa whistle less in 2020 than we did in 2017-2019.

Looking forward to a massive musical number on Nov. 3rd, 4th, and one more time on Jan. 20th.

Nearly everyone running things for Trump is "acting" and can be dismissed the moment they stop parroting his talking points. Yet another point of abuse that will need to be closed under a new administration.

[Username taken]

Exactly. That is why the polls couple of weeks from the Election Day are meaningless. There are undecided Democrats, undecided Republicans and undecided Independents who still haven't made their minds and will make a decision at the last minute.

The economy is in a slump. The pandemic is raging. The climate change is getting worse. And the idiotic and irresponsible behavior of the POTUS is making America look like a fool and laughingstock to the rest of the world.

Trump is unpopular with liberals but still remains popular with the conservatives due to his anti-immigration stance. There are some Blue collar workers who believe his promises of reviving the economy. Most cops, who are fed up with the BLM, will likely vote for Trump.

Mr. Bolton's recent statement disputing the article's claim of Trump's disparaging anti-military remarks doesn't help Mr. Biden well.

On a general note, anyone that’s still undecided at this point is either 1. Very stupid 2. Very ignorant 3. Very dishonest.

I tend to believe it’s a combination of all 3. This has been a highly unusual Presidency that’s culminated in an election year with a very volatile society, unhappy populace and depressed uncertain economy.

Anyone that’s still undecided at this point is a part of the problem.

[Tami]

We have been using the Oompa Loompa whistle less in 2020 than we did in 2017-2019.

Looking forward to a massive musical number on Nov. 3rd, 4th, and one more time on Jan. 20th.

Something like this?

[Odd Rödney]

But surely the massive majority of people that don’t vote for Joe B will do so because deep down they like what the Donald is doing.

I hope so mate, I really do.

Anything, and I do mean ANYTHING that doesn’t fit into Trump’s narrative is wrong. Nothing more complicated than that.

Yep, 100% The guy is a threat to this Democracy unlike any other.