1. #47401
    Old school comic book fan WestPhillyPunisher's Avatar
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    Saw this on Twitter. I'd say it illustrates the current mindset of the GQP:

    Avatar: Here's to the late, great Steve Dillon. Best. Punisher. Artist. EVER!

  2. #47402
    Extraordinary Member CaptainEurope's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by CSTowle View Post
    Again, see that "pat on the back" from some mouth-breather wearing a MAGA hat on Pelosi or Hillary and let's see how easy it is to laugh off.
    You're talking about something that did not happen. And probably would not happen, MAGAs are not jovial.

  3. #47403
    Extraordinary Member CaptainEurope's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by shooshoomanjoe View Post
    Yep, the GOP keep giving the dems live ammo to motivate their voters but the dems keep using blanks. "Vote for us because the other guys are terrible" shouldn't be their only playbook.
    It isn't. Democratic candidates almost always have more detailed plans for the future than Republicans, and better legislative records. Stop repeating that lie.

  4. #47404

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    Quote Originally Posted by JackDaw View Post
    Do the Republicans have an equivalent senator or senators? (Some one who quite often votes against the party line on key issues.)
    Quote Originally Posted by Tendrin View Post
    No, not really. \
    Lisa Murkowski is probably their closest thing to it. Susan Collins pretends that's where she is, too, but she's far closer to voting along party lines than she pretends to be.
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  5. #47405
    Ultimate Member Tendrin's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by worstblogever View Post
    Lisa Murkowski is probably their closest thing to it. Susan Collins pretends that's where she is, too, but she's far closer to voting along party lines than she pretends to be.
    Yeah, I thought about mentioning Murkowski, but while she has voted with Democrats from time to time, she has almost never blocked their agenda when they have power and that's what separates them from someone like Manchin or Sinema.

  6. #47406

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    Quote Originally Posted by Tendrin View Post
    Yeah, I thought about mentioning Murkowski, but while she has voted with Democrats from time to time, she has almost never blocked their agenda when they have power and that's what separates them from someone like Manchin or Sinema.
    The example I can think of where she did that most of all is on the ACA and repeal.
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  7. #47407
    Ultimate Member Mister Mets's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by JackDaw View Post
    Do the Republicans have an equivalent senator or senators? (Some one who quite often votes against the party line on key issues.)
    Fair question. One thing would be to look at major party line votes.
    Collins voted against ACB.
    Murkowski voted against Kavanaugh.

    One illustrative vote was about judicial filibusters.

    In 2013, most Democrats voted for the filibusters to not apply for judicial nominees (with the exception of the Supreme Court.) The nays were Carl Levin of Michigan (since retired), Mark Pryor of Arkansas (lost reelection to Tom Cotton) and Joe Manchin of Virginia (who remains one of the five most valuable Democrats in Congress for the party.)

    https://www.politico.com/story/2013/...-option-100199

    In 2017, when Democrats filibustered Gorsuch, all of the Republicans voted for a filibuster exception for Supreme Court nominees. Although Manchin joined the Democrats on that one.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/politics...orsuch/522156/

    I also looked at a tally of how Republicans voted on senate-confirmed positions in the Trump administration.

    https://ballotpedia.org/How_senators...nominees,_2017

    Murkowski voted against 3. McCain, Collins and Rand Paul voted against 2.


    Quote Originally Posted by numberthirty View Post
    The "Consequences..." have nothing to do with Manchin now.

    The "Consequences...", put simply, are -

    "You did not come through on BBB. No matter what reasons you have for exactly how that you did not is somehow an acceptable outcome? For lots of folks? It will not be."

    Those are the consequences.

    Folks have a perfectly logical reason to suspect that you will not come through on what you say you will.

    No matter how solid you believe that the "But..." you have might be?

    You've got to run in the actual reality that folks have a perfectly good reason to believe that you will not deliver, and turn out accordingly.
    I'm still not clear what this looks like. Are you saying that the consequence Biden should try against Manchin is a talking to?
    Last edited by Mister Mets; 06-28-2022 at 04:40 AM.
    Sincerely,
    Thomas Mets

  8. #47408
    Invincible Jersey Ninja Tami's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by worstblogever View Post
    The example I can think of where she did that most of all is on the ACA and repeal.
    If she had entered into the Senate as an independent, I would have found that to be a very natural fit for her. I think she is one of the least Republican of the Republican Senators. Definitely not a Democrat, but definitely not a typical Republican.
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  9. #47409
    Ultimate Member Tendrin's Avatar
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    It's bizarre to me that people think the Dems could 'punish' Manchin into doing what they want.

  10. #47410
    Ultimate Member Gray Lensman's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Tendrin View Post
    It's bizarre to me that people think the Dems could 'punish' Manchin into doing what they want.
    Especially when the ultimate response could be change party affiliation and caucus with the Republicans. And with it goes any appointment Biden tries to make, and even with budget reconciliation McConnell would then be deciding the agenda. Biden would only get to decide whether or not to veto it.
    Dark does not mean deep.

  11. #47411
    Ultimate Member Mister Mets's Avatar
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    An interesting point about how philanthropy can lead to polarization when you have advocacy without representation.

    I want to come back in a moment to your suggestions for how philanthropy can help build cross-ideological coalitions. But let me just push a bit on the question of philanthropy’s role in fostering polarization. I agree that there are other, more important drivers here. But it’s also true that since the 1960s, philanthropy has underwritten a vast complex of ideologically driven nonprofits that have played a significant role in shaping public debates. So while 60 or 70 years ago, leading civil society organizations were largely membership-based groups, today, civil society is much more dominated by professional nonprofit leaders bankrolled by foundations and major donors. So my question is this: When we talk about how philanthropy can reduce polarization, don’t we also need to talk about ways it might change to stop driving this trend in the first place?

    There’s no question that the growth of what Theda Skocpol has called “associations without members'' has grown in the last half-century, and mass membership organizations have shrunk. Before the 1960s, if you were an idealistic person who wanted to drive social change in some way, you really didn’t have much choice to either build a mass membership organization or work within one. But things really did change in the 1960s. Foundations like Ford and Rockefeller began to fund a huge network of organizations in law, civil rights, feminism, consumerism and the environment, a process I examined as the backdrop to my book “The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement.” Suddenly, if you were that idealistic person, you could skip over the step of building a mass movement and put out your shingle and start suing, lobbying and publishing. That model — a professionally staffed organization based in D.C., no members, funded primarily by foundations — came to be the dominant one on the center-left.

    That helped generate some of the characteristic features of contemporary elite polarization. You've got what I’ve called “advocacy” rather than representation, in which groups claim to speak for constituencies that they don’t actually have any organic structures of accountability to. I think that has had some important impacts on both the left and right. On the left, it has simultaneously encouraged an embrace of positions on social issues that are not widely supported by the actual people being advocated for, but also a kind of piecemeal, bite-sized economic policy that flows out of the fact that they are not trying to organize mass constituencies. On the right, I think it encouraged an economic policy that was at odds with the actual preferences of conservative voters (but aligned with conservative donors, whose preferences ran strongly libertarian on economics) on things like entitlements and trade. One way to think about the politics of the last few decades is that we’ve had an ideological conflict on both social and economic issues as a consequence of the incentives of the organizations competing for attention; that has left broad swathes of what the public actually cares about relatively unorganized. So in that sense, I think it probably does make sense to say that philanthropy has had an impact on polarization in shaping what we think it is we are supposed to be fighting about.
    Sincerely,
    Thomas Mets

  12. #47412

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    On this date in 2015, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profile of David Schultheis, a former Colorado State Senator who over the course of a decade, continuously proved himself to be an example of the GOP’s most cruel and heartless elected officials. In 2006, he responded to news of a fatal car accident that killed three Hispanic citizens by demanding that their citizenship should be checked (which, y’know, would have shown a lack of empathy even if they had survived). In 2009, during debate on a bill that would have provided HIV testing for all pregnant women, he cast the lone vote against it, arguing that “HIV stems from promiscuity” and he didn’t feel the legislature should “remove the negative consequences that take place from poor behavior and unacceptable behavior”. As if an issue position of hoping babies get AIDS to punish their mothers wasn’t revolting enough, later on in 2009 he compared President Obama’s economic policies to the terrorists who hijacked Flight 93 on 9/11, and declared “Let’s Roll” the last message of the people on board who stormed the cockpit rather than be aimed at another government building. Since leaving office in 2010, Schultheis remerged once in 2013 to say that the openly gay Speaker of the Colorado House adopting a child amounted to “deliberate child abuse”, so he’s a homophobic ***hole as well. Schultheis has been silent now going on six years consecutitvely, and it the time of this posting, is 76, so a political comeback seems unlikely.



    In 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, as well as 2021, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” presented profiles of the sitting U.S. House Representative from Texas’ 36th Congressional District, Brian Babin, a dentist by trade who made his first run for Congress two decades ago, failing to be elected in 1996, and making news for being caught in a campaign finance scandal, where he was found to have tried circumventing the rules for maximum donations from one donor by having intermediaries deliver the large sums in smaller pieces. He was caught, and fined $20,000 by the normally toothless FEC. Two years later, in 1998, that scandal may not have been what stood in the way of a Babin victory, as much as the story of his campaign manager simultaneously coming out of the closet, and resigning, saying that Babin had said numerous disparaging things about homosexuals in private meetings.

    Babin denied this, but the tabloid-like nature of the story, combined with his earlier scandal was enough to sink his chances again.

    Well, Texas' 36th District has never been shy about taking on controversial candidates, considering they elected Rep. Steve Stockman back in 2012, nearly two decades after he crazied his way out of office.

    By 2014, Rep. Stockman had shown he hadn't changed much, so the district elected Babin, another embarrassing throwback to two decades earlier. During the 2014 election season, Brian Babin revealed a variety of mind-numbingly stupid ideas, like his belief that the Affordable Care Act would bankrupt America, his desire to do away with the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Homeland Security, and of course, his desire to build a border wall along the U.S./Mexico border (beating Donald Trump to the punch on this stupid, stupid idea).

    Since hitting Washington, D.C. in his late sixties, he has followed up on his campaign platform, showing outrage whenever possible. Perhaps the best example is his response to the Supreme Court's King vs. Burwell ruling, where he introduced legislation that would force all nine of the Supreme Court Justices to enroll in healthcare through the Affordable Care Act (rather than the insurance plans they already have) to show them what they were relegating the American people to. Seriously, this was his patronizing quote:
    A few months later, his xenophobia hit a fever pitch. While most Republicans freaked out about the Syrian refugee program AFTER the terror attacks in Paris by ISIS sympathizers from France and Belgium (i.e. not carried out by any Syrian refugees), On September 17th, 2015, Brian Babin went on Facebook to call for a complete suspension of the entire Refugee Resettlement Program, writing:
    Two months later in November of 2015, Babin took to Breitbart Radio to be interviewed by Steve Bannon himself, and talk about legislation he filed to defund the Refugee resettlement program. While Babin acknowledged that Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus were refugee, this was different because, “Jesus and Mary didn’t have suicide bomb vests strapped on them.”

    Babin also has tried squaring his overall Islamophobic stance because he believes that "No-Go Zones" set up by Muslim communities are actually a thing happening in Michigan and Tennessee, and we should stop bringing in Muslims before more of them pop up. Hint for sane people: These “no-go zones” are not happening. All the way up into the last weeks of the Obama administration, Babin was fear-mongering about the refugee resettlement program, claiming it was a “Trojan Horse” to allow terrorists into the country.

    Once Donald Trump took office and instituted his unconstitutional Muslim ban, it was Rep. Babin who sent out an e-mail to his constituents, with a survey asking if they supported the measure or not, and within it, claimed several Muslim countries as “terrorism hot spots that have not produced a terrorist attacker in Europe or the United States within this century.

    Now, as you might expect with his hate of Muslim refugees, and a desire to build a border wall, Brian Babin ended up firmly in the corner of Donald Trump in the fall of 2016. So much so, in fact, that he defended Trump for calling Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman” during one of the presidential debates as she handed Trump his ass. Babin’s logic? “I think sometimes a lady needs to be told when she's being nasty. I do.”

    Brian Babin took the news of the GOP’s defeat in the 2018 elections about as well as most Republicans, which is not well. He’s still been hosted by the “alt right” (i.e. white nationalist) Breitbart News for interviews to claim that Democrats want “open borders” and otherwise fearmonger about immigrants in November of 2018, and only weeks into the new session of the House with Democrats in control, tried to block Palestinian-American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib from leading a delegation to the West Bank, because of reasons that amount to trying to stir up Islamophobia. Even as recently as a few days ago, he was pandering to xenophobes by taking a visit down to the U.S/Mexico border in Arizona for photo-ops with border patrol agents, while claiming that the border wall was near completion and one of Trump’s “promises made, promises kept”. (Someone’s living in a fantasy world.)
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  13. #47413
    Mighty Member Zauriel's Avatar
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    https://twitter.com/GreenPartyUS/sta...Ch7bWUq-MqAAAA

    Green Party US tweets:

    In 1974, then-Senator Joe Biden stated in regards to #RoeVsWade, "I don't like the Supreme Court decision on abortion. I think it went too far." He went on to say, "I don't think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body."

    "In 1982, Senator Biden was 1 of only 2 Democratic lawmakers who supported a constitutional amendment allowing states to overturn Roe v. Wade and pass their own laws on abortion. 9 years later, Biden was largely to blame for the confirmation of anti-abortion Justice Clarence Thomas."


    How the Democrats are culpable in the erosion of abortion rights

  14. #47414
    Ultimate Member Tendrin's Avatar
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    Biden deserves due criticism for a lot of things over his long career but the idea that he's 'to blame' for Clarence Thomas is typically stupid AF Green Party nonsense.

  15. #47415

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    Texas’ 36th is one of the reddest of red districts in all the country, with a +26 Republican lean in the Cook Partisan Voting Index, which helped Babin to coast to a third term in office with 74% of the vote. Back in Washington, Brian Babin’s stupidity continues:



    We will finish our update by reminding everyone of Brian Babin’s statement about the January 6th attack on the Capitol, where he lamented those who died, but defended his decision to not certify the election results, citing the non-existent “Election Fraud that undermines our freedoms. Hey, he didn’t die, he has no regrets. Nor any desire to hold anyone accountable.
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