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

[Tendrin]

Oklahoma’s far-right superintendent has insisted that the Tulsa race massacre can be taught in public schools without amounting to “critical race theory”—so long as it’s taught without discussing race.

Ryan Walters, the state’s former education secretary, has vocally railed against “CRT,” which he characterizes as any teaching remotely grappling with white supremacy. On Thursday, Walters fielded questions from parents and community members at a town hall, including one question about how curriculum about the Tulsa race massacre doesn’t violate his critical race theory ban.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/oklahoma-...163000688.html

I think this speaks for itself.

[CaptainEurope]

On the subject of psychopathic billionaires ruining the country by influencing laws and government, I have to ask: which modern nations around the world have the least amount of this kind of corporate meddling?

I think it's a lot harder to do in countries that don't have a two party system. In Germany, for example, the FDP liberal democrats are known as the "party of the better earning" and have been known to introduce legislation based on who donated money to them, like a reduction in hotel taxes after a big donation from Mövenpick. But this got treated as a bit of a scandal, and they are usually the smallest party in a 2 or 3 party coalition and if something looks blatantly corrupt, the coalition partners are less likely to go along with it.

[CaptainEurope]

Messy:
Cuba will send troops to fight against Ukraine in exchange for $2,000 per month per mercenary from the Kremlin.

F0e7Y7HX0AEDO9D.jpg

Cuban mercs being blessed by a Russian orthodox priest.

[Vakanai]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/oklahoma-...163000688.html

I think this speaks for itself.

Racists Protecting Racism for Racists Theory should no longer be taught in our conservative party.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/oklahoma-...163000688.html

I think this speaks for itself.

Saw this story on my Twitter feed this morning. Talk about asinine!

[WestPhillyPunisher]

It's Walmart Melania to the rescue:

Casey DeSantis deployed to save her husband from drowning in his own 'mediocrity': columnist

With Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) watching his campaign to upstage Donald Trump as the Republican Party's 2024 presidential frontrunner floundering, an MSNBC analyst suggested the governor's wife is having to be deployed to give a jolt to the moribund campaign.

In his column for MSNBC, Ja'han Jones wrote that Casey DeSantis is hitting the trail to make up for her husband's lack of warmth and personality that has been exposed since he left the friendly confines of Florida.

[babyblob]

Messy:
Cuba will send troops to fight against Ukraine in exchange for $2,000 per month per mercenary from the Kremlin.

F0e7Y7HX0AEDO9D.jpg

Cuban mercs being blessed by a Russian orthodox priest.

Guess they need to find somewhere to replace the Wanger Group.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Christie says Trump kept classified docs because ‘he wants to pretend he’s still president’

Republican presidential candidate and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) said Thursday that he believes former President Trump kept classified documents after leaving the White House because “he wants to pretend he’s still president.”

“I think it was purely ego,” Christie told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “I think, Jake, he could not and still cannot to this day deal with the fact that he’s the only person outside the state of Delaware to ever lose to Joe Biden, and he wants to pretend he’s still president.”

“He wanted to continue to pretend he was president and show these things to people and say, ‘Look what I still have, look what I still know,’” Christie added.

Trump pleaded not guilty last month to 37 counts related to his handling of classified documents, about 300 of which were recovered from his Mar-a-Lago residence last year.

The federal indictment accused the former president of improperly retaining national defense information, sharing it with individuals who did not have proper security clearances and making efforts to prevent the federal government from recovering the classified documents that remained in his possession.

Maybe there's a kernel of truth in what Christie said, but like another poster here already said, when it comes to Trump, everything is transactional, meaning he probably intended to eventually sell those documents to the highest bidder.

[CaptainEurope]

Bidenomics continue to keep people busy:

Private-sector job growth in the United States experienced a significant surge in June, demonstrating the resilience of the labor market. According to ADP's report, private sector jobs increased by 497,000, surpassing expectations and marking a substantial jump from the previous month.

This surge was significantly higher than the projected 250,000 jobs and surpassed the 278,000 gain recorded in the previous month.

[hyped78]

Considering for the longest time the US had very high Tax Rates for the richest Americans when the US was at it's Greatest (According to MAGA) and for the majority of it's existence, I think that the laxity introduced by Reagan and conservatives in this country since has led to almost none of that money actually used to create enough jobs or get back into the economy to do the work of commerce.

You’re assuming that higher tax rates linearly means higher paid tax, when the economic reality is much more complex than that. For example, as discussed before, in France higher tax rates on billionaires simply led to them moving their incomes to lower tax jurisdictions. So France went from collecting less than desired tax to collecting zero.

The correlation between tax rates and the actual tax paid by the ultra-rich is influenced by various factors, including tax planning strategies, income composition, economic behavior, and policy choices. Different studies and analysis, incl. in the US, have presented various (opposite, conflicting) perspectives on this topic, and it remains a complex one in economics and tax policy discussions.

In summary: it’s not that simple.

[hyped78]

Well, there are plenty of people who believe Soros is the source of all evil. Not here, thankfully, but it's out there.

That’s exactly why I mentioned him

[Ragged Maw]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/oklahoma-...163000688.html

I think this speaks for itself.

Wouldn't this be almost like trying to come up with a "race-neutral history" of the Civil Rights Movement where "some unfortunate people marched against out-of-control firehoses and dogs and cried for an end to the spontaneous gravity wells that formed in the back of buses, drawing them in"?

I think it's a lot harder to do in countries that don't have a two party system. In Germany, for example, the FDP liberal democrats are known as the "party of the better earning" and have been known to introduce legislation based on who donated money to them, like a reduction in hotel taxes after a big donation from Mövenpick. But this got treated as a bit of a scandal, and they are usually the smallest party in a 2 or 3 party coalition and if something looks blatantly corrupt, the coalition partners are less likely to go along with it.

So more parties (with genuine pull in politics) tend to be a strong buffer against lobbying and other cronyism. I can see how that makes sense.

[hyped78]

most Nordic countries seem better balanced on the whole for example. Finland and Sweden and Norway and such.

But this is just an outsider's perspective, those countries might not be as great as they look. But they definitely look better than most from the outside at least.

So the Scandinavian region somehow managed a decent “balancing act”. Good to know. Hope they continue to advance and go far without becoming just another corpo racket.

Those countries have far-right parties either in the current government or with high voting %s. Not sure if they can still be viewed in the same light as they were some years ago.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/europe/art...00299_143.html
https://euobserver.com/green-economy/157104
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65926194
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...on-finns-party

Even the left wing nordic parties have veered markedly more to the right:
https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/03/13/...-forced-return
https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows...on-immigration

[hyped78]

So more parties (with genuine pull in politics) tends to be a strong buffer against lobbying and other cronyism. I can see how that makes sense.

I personally prefer more parties but there are also downsides, e.g. it’s harder to form stable governments, governments tend to not be able to complete their full terms, snap elections, political instability, smaller parties ending up in government with more power vs. their share of the vote, the most voted party not forming government, etc. Strange bedfellows in government (e.g. Germany right now). Multiple examples here in Europe of all of the above.

[worstblogever]

In both 2015, as well as 2016, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” published profiles of Justin Harris, a member of the Arkansas House of Representatives who we covered not so much for his radically socially conservative record or that he was a theocrat who wanted Bible studies to be an actual elective course in Arkansas schools, but for the fact that he was involved in a scandal where he adopted two girls, then decided they were afflicted by demons, tried performing exorcisms on them, and then "rehomed" them with a former employee who he had fired who then started molesting the girls (all the while, collecting subsidies on his adopted children, who he no longer had in his home). Revoltingly, nobody registered on the ballot against Harris, and this story broke almost literally at the deadline to file for the 2014 elections... so he won another term in office unopposed. Because "rehoming" adopted children was legal at the time in Arkansas, he was not found to have committed a crime, but ignored calls to resign from office during the scandal. In fact, the self-righteous tool got on social media to quote scripture about being unfairly accused, and the Lord would "laugh at the wicked", showing us all that he felt HE was the real victim.

On this date in 2017, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” published its profile of Wendy Long, a two-time loser in attempts to be elected to the U.S. Senate in New York. In 2012, she allowed Sen. Kristen Gillibrand to win her Senate seat by the largest margin in New York history. In 2016… she took a run at Sen. Chuck Schumer trying to chip away at Schumer’s support with the Jewish community after the Obama administration and Democrats managed to approve a treaty to curb Iran’s nuclear program that they felt was too lenient. However, Wendy Long has been a friend to lunatic conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza for a quarter century now, going all the way back to when both were in college together and while working on the school newspaper “accidentally” published an excerpt from Hitler’s Mein Kampf about how “warding off the Jews was doing the Lord’s work”, on Yom Kippur of all days. D’Souza actually managed to try and act like he was the victim after the two were forced to apologize for the actions of an “unnamed staffer”. Anyhow, D’Souza was convicted of election fraud, believed to have been in his attempts to get his old pal Wendy elected by making illegal straw donations to her campaign. Well, Long was already established as wanting to govern as a Catholic, outlawing abortion, gay marriage, and wanting to even push back against birth control. She eventually couldn’t pretend to be sane any longer herself, and got on Twitter to post about how a neighborhood had become crime infested after a “mosque displaced a church”, earning her the criticism of her own party. She was only warming up. Wendy Long started speaking in front of the Oath Keepers, the infamous anti-government militia group that will support anyone who lets them still have easy access to guns, and not be treated like the paranoid domestic terrorists that they are. Again, Wendy was keeping some interesting company. Finally, she hyperbolically referred to Chuck Schumer as an “enemy of the Constitution”, at an event that declared him one of the Oath Keepers’ “dirty dozen Marxist traitors in America”. Wendy Long only got 27% of the vote against Schumer. Considering she had yet to pay off over a quarter of a million dollars in debt from her FIRST attempt to be elected to office, she probably should have probably sat out her second one or spent the money on a good therapist.

On this date in 2018, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” published a profile about Gary Emineth, who was a 2018 candidate for U.S. Senate in North Dakota, and please do note the past tense we used in that introduction. Eminith is by no means a political outsider, though, having served several years as a member of the Republican National Committee and as the Chairman of the North Dakota GOP. He last ran for a seat in the North Dakota state legislature back in 1984, and 34 years later, he decided to take a crack at U.S. Senate. The main problem with Emineth’s candidacy was that he apparently forgot all the horrible things he had posted on Facebook over the past several years that were collected by CNN’s K-File, and got reminded of them, one after another, in a live interview back home. Perhaps the most inflammatory post was Emineth submitting a poll question to his followers as to whether or not there should be a government ban on mosques. (For those who paid attention in basic civics courses, such a ban would be a violation of the First Amendment on the grounds of violating someone’s freedom of religion.) Anyway, a stammering Emineth could only defend that by saying he “only retweeted it”. But that wasn’t the only thing that was found on his Facebook page. There was also a post where Eminith complained about “a bunch of Arabs” during a protest by Palestinians against Israelis (hint: not Arabs) and another where he referred to President Obama as a “POS”, and he gave several explanations for what the abbreviation was supposed to mean, before settling on it being a typo and he meant to type “POTUS”. There was then a third post that compared people on welfare to wild animals that shouldn’t be fed, which Emineth didn’t deny that meaning of, and that he actually was making a valid point. Needless to say, it wasn’t long thereafter that Emineth realized he wasn’t going to help his party win a seat in the Senate, and Emineth’s candidacy literally only lasted about a week and a half.Instead, Emineth submitted himself as a candidate for the North Dakota State Senate, choosing instead to challenge Democratic State Senator Erin Oban in District 35 of the State Senate, and still lost in that race by about 9% of the vote.

On this date in 2019, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profiled Jasmine Saavedra, who ran for Congress to try and be the U.S. House Representative for California’s 44th Congressional District. Saavedra, a dedicated Trump supporter who is already out of her gourd enough to be one of the few “Latinos for Trump” (she’s an immigrant from Nicaragua… and… apparently doesn’t seem to realize she’s not Trump’s kind of person…) said her top priority in Congress was to see to getting the border wall built. If there’s not already enough hypocrisy to make you sit down, Saavedra seemed to think embracing the very worst kinds of bigotry that Republicans can muster would be a great way to fundraise, and decided to stalk a transgender woman around town, then post a live video to Facebook where she did her best to gather a mob of customers from around a Denny’s restaurant when that woman used the restroom to storm in to harass her. Facebook banned Saavedra from their platform for violation of terms. Suffice to say, this did not prove to be a winning strategy in a blue-leaning district in a year where Republicans got shellacked in California, and Saavedra was under criminal investigation for her actions. Jazmina Saavedra somehow was the top Republican candidate for this seat, finishing with a whopping 10% of the vote in the primary, and failing to qualify for the general election. Her political career, as it was, seems to revolve around getting kicked out of bars and restaurants and play the victim, even in red states.

On this date in 2020, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profiled Joey Saladino AKA Joey Salads, a 2020 candidate for U.S. House of Representatives for New York’s 11th Congressional District, hoping to knock off sitting Democratic Congressman Max Rose and flip his seat back red. Now, Joey Saladino aka Joey Salads should not be confused with the Joseph Saladino, a Republican who served on the New York State Assembly from District 9 from 2013-2017. Because one is a political legacy whose father was a New York State Supreme Court Justice and resigned after it was revealed he pocketed $16,000 of Hurricane Sandy relief money he wasn’t entitled to, and the guy we’re profiling today, Joey Salads, is a racist troll who, when he isn’t just s***posting as many racial slurs onto Twitter as he can, makes “prank” videos today that are just him harassing people in bigoted scenarios like going to a black neighborhood with an “ALL LIVES MATTER” sign, and then playing the victim if anyone confronts him about it. Perhaps the most jarring of those videos would be the one where Saladino turned up at a Trump rally wearing a Nazi armband as a “prank”, and oddly most other attendees seemed fine with it. And the Republican Party was fine with having a candidate for Congress named Joey Saladino who posted a video of himself peeing into his own mouth onto the internet. No, that’s not hyperbole. Joey Saladino dropped out of the Congressional race in December of 2019, but is a gross enough racist that even Twitter suspended him permanently in May of 2020. Here’s hoping his whole “business model” of likes and views goes in the toilet, where his urine streams hopefully will also start to go.