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

[Kirby101]

The GOP is like the Third Reich, making peace treaties while planning their invasion.

[Wildling]

Louisiana judge found guilty of sex crimes against teenage daughters’ friends

But let's lose our minds and send Trump's Senators and DOJ against a Netflix movie instead...

[Tami]

Screenshot_2020-09-13 The Lincoln Project on Twitter.jpg

Twitter Link

[Tami]

[Tami]

Officials: Iran weighs plot to kill U.S. ambassador to South Africa

The Iranian government is considering assassinating the American ambassador to South Africa, U.S. intelligence reports say, according to a U.S. government official familiar with the issue and another official who has seen the intelligence.

News of the plot comes as Iran continues to seek ways to retaliate for President Donald Trump’s decision to kill a powerful Iranian general earlier this year, the officials said. If carried out, it could dramatically ratchet up already serious tensions between the U.S. and Iran and create enormous pressure on Trump to strike back — possibly in the middle of a tense election season.

[babyblob]

Officials: Iran weighs plot to kill U.S. ambassador to South Africa

Now that it is out in the open I doubt it will happen. Iran does cowardly things from behinds the scenes then deny it. They wont do something like this if everyone knows its in the cards.

[worstblogever]

Officials: Iran weighs plot to kill U.S. ambassador to South Africa

"U.S. Intelligence".

F***ing bulls***. Trump is gonna lose, they need a bad guy for him to tough talk about. Iran wouldn't be stupid enough to provoke an act of war when they want to wait out the Trump administration to re-establish the United States being involved in the nuclear treaty that Trump tore up.

This is the sort of "intelligence" that justified the Iraq War, but even more f***ing transparent.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Regarding Ms. McDaniel, to quote the late Rick James, cocaine is a hell of a drug.

[Tami]

I will never forgive Joe Biden for the War of 1812.

Biden should have also done more during the bubonic plague. I’m very disappointed in him.

Dinosaurs would still be around if Biden had acted sooner.

Couldn't Biden have stopped Jesus Christ from being crucified? He really has a lot of explaining to do.

And it goes on and on and on .... Twitter is having a field day with this

Oh, I like this one

I won't forgive Biden for allowing Thanos’ army to overtake Earth’s Mightiest Heroes and taking the Vision stone by using the Time Stone to simply reverse time, killing Vision and taking the stone for himself. Sad!

[babyblob]

I will never forgive Joe Biden for the War of 1812.

Biden should have also done more during the bubonic plague. I’m very disappointed in him.

Dinosaurs would still be around if Biden had acted sooner.

Couldn't Biden have stopped Jesus Christ from being crucified? He really has a lot of explaining to do.

And it goes on and on and on .... Twitter is having a field day with this

Oh, I like this one

I won't forgive Biden for allowing Thanos’ army to overtake Earth’s Mightiest Heroes and taking the Vision stone by using the Time Stone to simply reverse time, killing Vision and taking the stone for himself. Sad!

As funny as these are I wonder how many people will take them seriously. Like I can see Hannity like legit running with these.

[Tami]

As funny as these are I wonder how many people will take them seriously. Like I can see Hannity like legit running with these.

Then I hope he uses the last one, because anyone dumb enough to believe it, was dumb enough to believe that Wakanda is now a trade partner of the US. US government lists fictional nation Wakanda as trade partner

[Jack Dracula]

Maybe it's just me but I'd think that someone with multiple speechwriters on the payroll could figure a way to communicate to the public at large the potential dangers posed by the virus without causing a "panic".

[WestPhillyPunisher]

I will never forgive Joe Biden for the War of 1812.

Biden should have also done more during the bubonic plague. I’m very disappointed in him.

Dinosaurs would still be around if Biden had acted sooner.

Couldn't Biden have stopped Jesus Christ from being crucified? He really has a lot of explaining to do.

And it goes on and on and on .... Twitter is having a field day with this

Oh, I like this one

I won't forgive Biden for allowing Thanos’ army to overtake Earth’s Mightiest Heroes and taking the Vision stone by using the Time Stone to simply reverse time, killing Vision and taking the stone for himself. Sad!

That's going to have legs for a few days.

====================

Nevada Gov. Condemns Trump’s ‘Reckless And Selfish’ Indoor Campaign Rally

Steve Sisolak lambasted the president for endangering lives and acting as though rules don’t apply to him. Newsflash, Steve-O, they don't!

**********

Former FBI Agent Peter Strzok: Trump Clearly ‘Compromised By The Russians’

“They hold leverage over him that makes him incapable of placing the national interests ... ahead of his own,” Strzok said. Golden showers, anyone?

**********

Bob Woodward Reveals Why He Concluded Trump Is The ‘Wrong Man For The Job’

In a “60 Minutes” interview, the veteran journalist was asked why he went against his reputation of avoiding personal political judgments. Clearly Trump has been such a dumpster fire, Woodward had to say what he did.

**********

Health Official Out To Manipulate CDC Reports Has Deep Russian Ties

Michael Caputo’s efforts to change CDC reports to make Trump look good could be even more complicated. Why does this NOT surprise me?

**********

Trump Seems To Endorse Extrajudicial Killing: ‘There Has To Be Retribution’

“That’s the way it has to be,” Trump said after U.S. marshals killed a man suspected in a deadly shooting in Portland, Oregon, last month. To say that's dangerous would be an understatement.

**********

Michael Bloomberg Plans To Spend $100 Million In Florida To Help Joe Biden

Florida is one of the biggest prizes on Election Day, and it is also the most expensive of the expected battlegrounds in which to campaign. That's sure to piss off Dolt45.

[worstblogever]

In 2014, 2015, as well as 2016, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" published profiles of David Vitter, the former U.S. Senator from Louisiana, a man implicated in the D.C. Madam Scandal several years back who according to some of the prostitutes he frequented, enjoys being diapered like a baby. Now, as if that weren’t enough to open and close his profile, you have to also consider he’s enough of a partisan hack to have been only one of two senators who voted against Hillary Clinton to become Secretary of State in 2009 (the other was Jim DeMint), he opposed the Franken Amendment (which was written to punish military contractors who try to cover up sexual assaults overseas to Americans), and has been trying to destroy Planned Parenthood long before the manufactured “scandal” over doctored videos that we saw here in 2015. In spite of his main “job creating” in Washington having been to find a niche for certain sex workers, Sen. Vitter won re-election in 2010 during the Tea Party Wave by running some of the most jaw-dropping racist anti-immigrant ads of that campaign in a very crowded field. Somehow, don’t ask us how, he survived a prostitution scandal for almost eight years, and actually had the gall to hope everyone just forgot about it and ran for Governor of Louisiana in 2015, attempting to replace Bobby Jindal in that role. He lost that election narrowly to John Bel Edwards, and after completely exhausting his campaign war chest in the quixotic effort, he opted to finally retire to go home and presumably wear adult-size pampers around the house.


On this date in 2017, 2018, as well as 2019, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profiled, the U.S. House Representative from Georgia's 6th Congressional District, Karen Handel, who narrowly won the special election for her seat over John Ossoff last year. She had previously finished third in the GOP Primary in the 2014 elections behind David Perdue while trying to win office to the U.S. Senate from there, in 2010, lost a squeaker against Nathan Deal to be elected Governor of Georgia. In the 2017 special election race to replace former Congressman Tom Price, who became (at least for a time), the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Handel identified supporting anti-abortion efforts, repealing the Affordable Care Act, constructing Donald Trump's border wall, simplifying the tax code, and increasing national defense spending as policy priorities if she would reach office.

Handel's most recent work before running for office included taking an executive job at the Susan B. Komen Foundation (the charity that gets less than stellar ratings for actually putting its incoming money towards efforts to cure breast cancer) where she deliberately tried to cut donations being made to Planned Parenthood's breast cancer screenings by the organization, because she drinks the GOP Kool-Aid and doesn't like that a minute portion of their budget goes towards paying for abortions. She actually resigned after Susan G. Komen reversed her decision, but admits what she did in a book she wrote, "Planned Bullyhood", where she paints herself as quite the martyr in the story.

Handel's name also came up a lot at the Justice Department's Voting Rights division from 2007 to 2010 while she served as Georgia's Secretary of State, because of her efforts to purge voter rolls repeatedly to try and insure that Democrats couldn't flip Georgia blue in any presidential election. In lower level races, Handel worked to literally block Democratic candidates from getting their names on the ballot. Hell, at one point in the build-up to her race against John Ossoff, she responded to the news that a judge would allow 8,000 voters who registered late to vote in the election by criticizing him and sending out a fundraising e-mail about how unfair all those actions promoting participation in our democracy were.

And Karen Handel is hardly sympathetic on LGBTQ issues, as evidenced in 2010 when she openly discussed banning gay adoption because she felt not only would two gay parents be not a good situation, but even "a situation where the parents are not married, as in one man and one woman, is not the best household for a child." She wouldn't even support straight parents with a kid out of wedlock. But did she evolve on the issue by 2017? HELL NAW as can be seen in this video where a constituent who admits to being conservative herself talks about how she has a gay daughter who might want to adopt one day, and asks if Handel supports the concept of someone being able to adopt a child regardless of their sexual orientation. Handel tells her with a smile and shrug, “my faith calls me to a different place on that issue,” because her faith apparently teachers her the virtues of bigotry and ignorance. Handel then scurries away like there might be some gay she could catch off this woman via her daughter. Both of these incidents enraged Georgia's Log Cabin Republicans, who supposedly had Karen Handel as a member of their group in 2002, and have only watched her consistently argue against them having, y'know, rights.

In the final debate between Democratic candidate John Ossoff, Karen Handel shocked everyone present during what should have been a softball question on the minimum wage, when she not only opposed an increase to it, but phrased her argument as being that she "did not support a livable wage". Karen Handel, ladies and gents... she doesn't even care whether a working family can survive or not, the hand of the free market should get to decide that. Hell, even 55% of REPUBLICANS support raising the minimum wage to $10.10 at the time of her remarks.

After finishing second in the initial election against John Ossoff, with all of the other Republicans out of the way, Handel won with 51% of the vote on election day, in the most expensive House race in American history, where the national GOP spent millions to keep her afloat against all the individual donations Ossoff received. This was with the help of last minute ads that bizarrely tried tying John Ossoff to the shooting of Congressman Steve Scalise. Her performance, while a win... was not a good bellweather for Republicans, who yes, held a seat, but a seat that has averaged twenty point wins for Republicans since the 1970s, and has a +8 Republican lean in the Cook Partisan Voting Index.

And all the money Republicans spent to hold onto this seat proved to be only a temporary patch, as in the 2018 elections, Democrat Lucy McBath upset Karen Handel, and flipped Georgia’s 6th blue, with Handel only getting 49% of the vote. Handel vowed to avenge that loss, and advanced out of the GOP Primary… what could stop Karen Handel?

She remains an callous twit without a shred of empathy for other human beings, is what’s stopping her. Right around the time the Black Lives Matter movement was making headlines this summer after the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Aubry, Karen Handel had a constituent tell her how she was tired of Lucy McBath talking about her son, who had been murdered by a man who supposed felt “threatened” because he was playing music too loud in the same parking lot, and the constituent said “she needs to get off of it”. Handel vehemently agreed, saying, “You have to think outside of your own person.”

Which…. That’s exactly the point. Lucy McBath wasn’t murdered. Her son was. And she’s thinking about all the other people who are killed with gun violence every year needlessly. Just…

Between telling a mother with a dead son she needs to “get over it” and not believing in a livable wage, we’d like to think Lucy McBath has a second term in office in the works and Karen Handel will have all the free time in the world. We’d like to think.

[Tami]

Biden Creates Legal War Room, Preparing for a Big Fight Over Voting

Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign is establishing a major new legal operation, bringing in two former solicitors general and hundreds of lawyers in what the campaign billed as the largest election protection program in presidential campaign history.

Legal battles are already raging over how people will vote — and how ballots will be counted — this fall during the pandemic, and senior Biden officials described the ramp-up as necessary to guard the integrity of a fall election already clouded by President Trump’s baseless accusations of widespread fraud.

The new operation will be overseen by Dana Remus, who has served as Mr. Biden’s general counsel on the 2020 campaign, and Bob Bauer, a former White House counsel during the Obama administration who joined the Biden campaign full-time over the summer as a senior adviser.

Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign is establishing a major new legal operation, bringing in two former solicitors general and hundreds of lawyers in what the campaign billed as the largest election protection program in presidential campaign history.

Legal battles are already raging over how people will vote — and how ballots will be counted — this fall during the pandemic, and senior Biden officials described the ramp-up as necessary to guard the integrity of a fall election already clouded by President Trump’s baseless accusations of widespread fraud.

The new operation will be overseen by Dana Remus, who has served as Mr. Biden’s general counsel on the 2020 campaign, and Bob Bauer, a former White House counsel during the Obama administration who joined the Biden campaign full-time over the summer as a senior adviser.