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

[4saken1]

Anyways, I think it's a moot discussion. If Trump runs, he is a shoe-in for the nomination. Republicans have about as much chance of giving up on him as a crackhead does of giving up cold turkey. Pictures would need to surface of him having sex with Hillary Clinton for him to not get the nomination. Other than that, nothing he can or will do, no matter how abominable, will ruin him for the majority of Republicans.

[worstblogever]

An update on a CSGOPOTD a little early... New Hampshire state legislator Ken Weyler.

Ken Weyler has been stripped of his committee assignments because he just... y'know, started trying to link Covid-19 vaccines to... SATAN. The whole conspiracy he was sharing included vaccines containing "octopus-like creatures", that they could allow mind control via 5G towers, and that the Catholic Church is secretly run by someone referred to as "The Grey Pope".

I must mock him further by including a gif:

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Anyways, I think it's a moot discussion. If Trump runs, he is a shoe-in for the nomination. Republicans have about as much chance of giving up on him as a crackhead does of giving up cold turkey. Pictures would need to surface of him having sex with Hillary Clinton for him to not get the nomination. Other than that, nothing he can or will do, no matter how abominable, will ruin him for the majority of Republicans.

Trump has had the white grievance/supremacy vote from Republicans sewn up since 2017, and everyone knows it, that's why the party can't (or won't) quit him. Right wingers were overjoyed to have had a President of the United States of America stand up for racism, sexism, xenophobia and homophobia while not giving even half a **** that he was (and still is) on a campaign to destroy democracy, just so long as he made them feel good about being scumbags. That's one hell of a drug to give up, and Republicans have NO desire to do that.

[worstblogever]

On this date, in both 2014, as well as in 2015, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" published profiles of former Texas Congressman Steve Stockman, a raving lunatic conspiracy theorist who was booted from Congress after one terrifyingly insane term back from 1995-1997 who inexplicably found his way back into the Capitol building eighteen years later, getting back in from 2013-2015. Over the years Stockman has come up with ideas like forcing all members of Congress to live in dorms, posed wild accusations about “the truth about what happened in the Koresh compound”, and apparently was keeping corrospondence with some militia groups who tried warn him about the Oklahoma City bombing before it happened, and for whatever reason, he forwarded their fax to the NRA before the FBI. He has also defended the Liberty Lobby, a right-wing radio show that claims the Holocaust is a hoax against charges that they might be anti-Semitic, and called for all sex education to be removed from public schools. And that was in his FIRST term. In his second term these past few years, Rep. Stockman called for the impeachment of President Obama for using executive orders on gun control, compared Obama to Saddam Hussein, said Obama’s birth certificate is faked, and because he was born in Kenya he can’t be president, but while Ted Cruz’s birth certificate says he was born in Canada, he’s legit. Stockman showed an astounding level of ignorance about transgendered citizens by even being able to define even what the term “transgender” is, and distributed bumper stickers that said (and this is 100% true), “If babies had guns they wouldn’t be aborted”.

On this date in 2016, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" featured a profile of David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan who through the years, has run for both Governor of Louisiana, and, in 2016, the Alt-Right movement and Donald Trump’s presidential run inspired him to run for U.S. Senate. Now, we’re not going to get into the details of every ugly thing David Duke has said over the past four decades, because we would be here all day... but suffice to say, there is no individual that has been so dedicated to hate that we can think of in American politics. Whether it’s for African Americans, Jews, immigrants, or the gay community, David Duke has been disparaging them since the 1970s in the name of white supremacy. We hope and pray David Duke is never a serious candidate, ever again until the day he dies.

On this date in 2017, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" featured a profile of Bryce Marlatt, a former Oklahoma State Senator who served for almost a decade , chalking up a voting record to suppress to combat statistically non-existent cases of in-person voter fraud via stricter Voter ID laws meant to suppress the vote, voting to try and nullify federal firearms laws and the Affordable Care Act, a ban on Sharia Law, voting for a law to strip doctors that perform abortions of their medical license, and a vote for a Personhood bill. Where Marlatt was truly noteworthy was how after he was lucky enough to survive a DUI scandal back in 2014, when the police found him passed out behind the wheel of his parked vehicle, and when they asked him how many beers he had, he told them, “No more than anybody else. I had what you would call a bourbon and coke.” Based on how bloodshot his eyes were in the mugshot, it must have been in a very large glass, if not a bucket. Anyway, we’re guessing that Marlatt learned his lesson after this incident, and made it a point to always take a cab, or call an Uber to come pick him up after a night of hard drinking. But perhaps the Uber route wasn’t the way to go, because Bryce has such poor self-control that when he was picked up by a female Uber driver in July 2017, he went and sexually assaulted the poor woman, grabbing her forcefully and starting to kiss her on the neck while she was trying to drive. Why, would you believe that a “family values” Republican who’s a husband and father of four would act in such a way? On September 6th, 2017, Bryce Marlatt was officially charged in the case, and he resigned six days later. As it stands, Bryce Marlatt is going to be real busy trying to keep himself out of jail, if not off of any sex offenders’ lists. And that’s not exactly the sort of thing that would be good on a resume of someone seeking higher office, which he would have to do because he’d be term-limited in the Oklahoma state legislature.

It was on this date in 2018, and in 2019, that “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” first profiled former Pennsylvania State Senator Scott Wagner, who mounted a run to try to become the next Governor of Pennsylvania in the 2018 mid-term elections, running against Democratic incumbent Tom Wolf. As a legislator, Wagner has served since 2014, and is considers himself 100% Pro-Life, which is hard to argue as he supports even fetal heartbeat bills that effectively ban abortion at 6 weeks, before many women even know they are pregnant, and sponsored a bill to outlaw D&E abortions prior to 20 weeks. His campaign for governor kicked off in a less-than-inspiring manner, as while addressing a country club crowd, Wagner realized that he was being filmed by a progressive activist… so he threatened to confiscate their camera (which, he has no legal right to do), and then backed that threat up, snatching it away. The activist then wisely pulled out their cell phone and began recording with that, demanding that Wagner return their actual camera, at which point, Wagner physically assaulted them in an effort to get the phone away. So… that’s nuts, right? Like, you would think he would have an aide or staffer handle this sort of thing and be subtle about it, but nope. As the GOP Primary went on, at one point Scott Wagner argued that “teachers are overpaid”, which runs contrary to most of the grassroots movements for raises for teachers that have spawned in the past 18 months or so, and is incredibly hard to justify based on the actual math involved. Not that the math matters to Wagner, though, because he overstated the average teacher’s salary by roughly $18,000 a year. Anyway, even with some serious red flags popping up along the way, Scott Wagner won the GOP nomination for Governor of Pennsylvania with 44% of the vote in a three way primary. He then resigned from the Pennsylvania State Senate to focus full time on his gubernatorial campaign, and honestly, based on what we’re about to talk about, it might be better if he’d focused on being a State Senator, and campaigned saying how important that job is. There’s people who deny the existence of climate change, and then there’s crackpots with cockamamie junk scientific explanations for why it’s not a thing. Scott Wagner is decidedly in the latter category, as he has not only addressed increasing temperatures by falsely claiming that the Earth is getting closer to the sun, but that some of the warming we’re seeing is from “body heat” from rising populations. In March of 2018, at a town hall, a potential voter asked him how he could be so clueless about the environment, as she had grave concerns as to what the Earth might be like if something wasn’t done to halt climate change, and Wagner just decided to go with condescension in his reply, telling her, “You’re real young and naïve.” On LGBTQ issues Wagner came out in support of a ban on same sex marriage that would, of course, be unconstitutional via the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling, and in August 2018, he was recorded voicing his support for transphobic bathroom bans, citing people’s “plumbing” to justify his bigotry. Now, if you think that was a gaffe, there is also the fact that Wagner was the only candidate in the race to refuse to release his tax returns, and his reason was that union employees at his private business might use that information to squeeze a higher salary out of him. In September 2018, Wagner decided to share with potential voters his thoughts on immigrants and Muslims, and… well… he lifted his talking points from InfoWars, and compared immigrants and Muslims to raccoons in a racist diatribe. You’re probably thinking that doing something that racist almost certainly would be the dumbest thing a candidate can say as the elections… but Wagner still wasn’t done. Now trailing far behind Gov. Tom Wolf in polls, he thought he would joke about the deficit by saying “Russia will help me with Tom Wolf,” and “I’ll call Paul Manafort if I have to.” (Manafort, of course, had already been found guilty on several counts of fraud, and was in the process of flipping and pleading guilty to a myriad of other crimes in the Mueller investigation.) Wagner’s last ditch campaign ad was to embody Judge Smails from Caddyshack, and threaten to stop on Tom Wolf’s face wearing golf spikes. Seriously. Suffice to say, Scott Wagner lost in his match-up against Tom Wolf, getting 40.7% of the vote.

[worstblogever]

On this date one year ago, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” first profiled Brian Mast, who has served as the U.S. House of Representatives in Florida’s 18th Congressional District since 2016, based on his honorable service in the U.S. Army working in explosive ordinance and disposal, and we’ll salute him for her service to our nation in the role that cost him the use of his legs…

And that’s about our limit for saying nice things about Brian Mast. During his first run for office in 2016, Mast was briefly linked with World Patent Marketing, a company that today no longer exists because the Federal Trade Commission shut it down because it was an invention promotion scam. World Patent Marketing donated a bunch of money to Mast's campaign fund and said in a press release that he sat on their advisory board. Mast has some convenient amnesia about his association with a professional scam outlet, saying he has no knowledge of being given a position on the board and said he only had a couple encounters with members of the company, at all.

So that’s shady. But that’s not even as “shady as hell” as our next item… Back in 2018, Anthony Bustamante, a campaign consultant who worked on Mast's 2016 campaign, told The Wall Street Journal that as a member of the Mast campaign, had used data hacked from the Democratic National Committee by Guccifer 2.0, a front for Russia's GRU military intelligence service, to adjust Mast's campaign strategy. The hacked data had been leaked by Guccifer 2.0 to the HelloFLA blog, just to help Brian Mast win election to Congress. (This would seem to be the member of Congress who solicited help in the 2016 election from Russia that was mentioned in the Mueller Report.) And, not for nothing, but in 2019, Brian Mast was pressured into returning campaign donation that he accepted from the quite dubious source that is Igor Fruman, as in the second half of “Lev and lgor the Russian guys arrested while trying to flee the country. Again, not a good look, and clearly got enough ties to Russia to be worn around Vladimir Putin’s neck.

Now, after the Pulse Shooting and then the Parkland Shooting, most of the Florida Republican caucus has been careful regarding statements they have made about the massive uptick in gun violence in our country, because when that many people have died in mass shootings, it’s practically personal for most of the state… however Brian Mast isn’t that smart, and only two days after Parkland, he blamed the rampage on “video games and violent movies”.

But we’re still not done with this creep. And we emphasize he’s a creep, especially given his idea of “humor”. Two “jokes” that turned up on Brian Mast’s Facebook page are particularly telling. Back in February of 2009, Rocco LeDonni, who is now Mast’s campaign manager, posted photos of himself in a bar in South Africa, and Mast commented, “im so proud of you... i hope you hook up with at least fifteen 15 year olds over there.... its legel there right.”

Yes, he just encouraged his campaign manager to commit statutory rape.

Two years later, in May of 2011, LeDonni posted, “Anyone have any good pick up lines for this weekend considering according to the crazy christian radio guy the world may end on Sunday?” And Mast responded that LeDonni should tell the target of his affections:

“How about don’t turn this rape into a murder.”

It got more disgusting than even that, and we know, that shouldn’t be possible, but in Mast’s “apology”, he Mast blamed his poor attempt on humor on his injuries in combat, and his campaign claimed the comments were posted while Mast was drugged up with “morphine, oxycodone, sleep sedatives, anti-inflammatories and anti-depressants” and therefore he wasn’t in his right mind when he made the comments … except he made the inappropriate “jokes” a year before he got his Purple Heart. So now he’s an outright liar, too…

Florida’s 18th Congressional District has only a +5 Republican lean in the Cook Partisan Voting Index, but yet, Mast was able to get re-elected with 56% of the vote, and return to Washington to do all of the stupid:

• December 3rd, 2019: Rep. Mast is one of 71 Republicans who votes against a resolution to disallow Russia from re-entering the G7 and makes it the G8 until it leaves Ukraine.
• December 18th, 2019: Mast ignores his Congressional duty to hold a president who has been proven to commit high crimes and misdemeanors accountable and votes against the first impeachment of Donald Trump.
• May 15th, 2020: Mast votes against the HEROES Act, to further support the healthcare industry and citizens affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.
• January 7th, 2021: Brian Mast votes for the objection to the electoral college’s votes in the 2020 election, a failure to send any sort of message that he wasn’t intimidated or sympathetic to those who attacked the Capitol to attempt a violent coup.
• January 13th, 2021: Rep. Mast votes against the second impeachment of Donald Trump, because the Republican Party no longer feels like they should be accountable for anything, including failed coups that result in the deaths of both their participants and police officers.
• February 4th, 2021: Brian Mast votes to keep Marjorie Taylor Greene’s committee assignments, because he wouldn’t want her to be accountable for all the bigoted remarks and conspiracy theories she’s spread online (probably because she’s a kindred spirit).
• February 25th, 2021: Mast votes against HR 5, the latest version of the Equality Act, that would provide workplace protections for LGBTQ Americans.
• March 3rd, 2021: Rep. Mast votes against HR 1, a bill created to prevent the corruption of money in politics, and protect voter access to the ballot box.
• March 3rd, 2021: Brian Mast votes against the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021.
• March 10th, 2021: Mast votes against the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, because he feels people deserve to die in poverty during a pandemic.
• March 17th, 2021: Rep. Mast votes against the re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act, likely because they feel the 2nd Amendment remaining absolute is more important than preventing people with a history of domestic abuse from owning a firearm (which statistics show, makes them more likely to use those firearms against women in their lives).
• May 19th, 2021: Rep. Mast votes against HR 3233, the creation of a commission to investigate the Capitol Attack.

We would like to add that since our first profile of Brian Mast, he has further tried to embody the “Florida Man” of the GQP, railing against Congressional mask mandates on the House floor, and putting everyone in Congress at risk of Covid-19. This was at a time when only 45% of the Republican caucus was vaccinated, and the Delta variant began surging.

In other words, he’s probably thinking he could one day be elected Governor if he channels Ron DeSantis enough.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

On this date one year ago, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” first profiled Brian Mast, who has served as the U.S. House of Representatives in Florida’s 18th Congressional District since 2016, based on his honorable service in the U.S. Army working in explosive ordinance and disposal, and we’ll salute him for her service to our nation in the role that cost him the use of his legs…

And that’s about our limit for saying nice things about Brian Mast. During his first run for office in 2016, Mast was briefly linked with World Patent Marketing, a company that today no longer exists because the Federal Trade Commission shut it down because it was an invention promotion scam. World Patent Marketing donated a bunch of money to Mast's campaign fund and said in a press release that he sat on their advisory board. Mast has some convenient amnesia about his association with a professional scam outlet, saying he has no knowledge of being given a position on the board and said he only had a couple encounters with members of the company, at all.

So that’s shady. But that’s not even as “shady as hell” as our next item… Back in 2018, Anthony Bustamante, a campaign consultant who worked on Mast's 2016 campaign, told The Wall Street Journal that as a member of the Mast campaign, had used data hacked from the Democratic National Committee by Guccifer 2.0, a front for Russia's GRU military intelligence service, to adjust Mast's campaign strategy. The hacked data had been leaked by Guccifer 2.0 to the HelloFLA blog, just to help Brian Mast win election to Congress. (This would seem to be the member of Congress who solicited help in the 2016 election from Russia that was mentioned in the Mueller Report.) And, not for nothing, but in 2019, Brian Mast was pressured into returning campaign donation that he accepted from the quite dubious source that is Igor Fruman, as in the second half of “Lev and lgor the Russian guys arrested while trying to flee the country. Again, not a good look, and clearly got enough ties to Russia to be worn around Vladimir Putin’s neck.

Now, after the Pulse Shooting and then the Parkland Shooting, most of the Florida Republican caucus has been careful regarding statements they have made about the massive uptick in gun violence in our country, because when that many people have died in mass shootings, it’s practically personal for most of the state… however Brian Mast isn’t that smart, and only two days after Parkland, he blamed the rampage on “video games and violent movies”.

But we’re still not done with this creep. And we emphasize he’s a creep, especially given his idea of “humor”. Two “jokes” that turned up on Brian Mast’s Facebook page are particularly telling. Back in February of 2009, Rocco LeDonni, who is now Mast’s campaign manager, posted photos of himself in a bar in South Africa, and Mast commented, “im so proud of you... i hope you hook up with at least fifteen 15 year olds over there.... its legel there right.”

Yes, he just encouraged his campaign manager to commit statutory rape.

Two years later, in May of 2011, LeDonni posted, “Anyone have any good pick up lines for this weekend considering according to the crazy christian radio guy the world may end on Sunday?” And Mast responded that LeDonni should tell the target of his affections:



It got more disgusting than even that, and we know, that shouldn’t be possible, but in Mast’s “apology”, he Mast blamed his poor attempt on humor on his injuries in combat, and his campaign claimed the comments were posted while Mast was drugged up with “morphine, oxycodone, sleep sedatives, anti-inflammatories and anti-depressants” and therefore he wasn’t in his right mind when he made the comments … except he made the inappropriate “jokes” a year before he got his Purple Heart. So now he’s an outright liar, too…

Florida’s 18th Congressional District has only a +5 Republican lean in the Cook Partisan Voting Index, but yet, Mast was able to get re-elected with 56% of the vote, and return to Washington to do all of the stupid:

• December 3rd, 2019: Rep. Mast is one of 71 Republicans who votes against a resolution to disallow Russia from re-entering the G7 and makes it the G8 until it leaves Ukraine.
• December 18th, 2019: Mast ignores his Congressional duty to hold a president who has been proven to commit high crimes and misdemeanors accountable and votes against the first impeachment of Donald Trump.
• May 15th, 2020: Mast votes against the HEROES Act, to further support the healthcare industry and citizens affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.
• January 7th, 2021: Brian Mast votes for the objection to the electoral college’s votes in the 2020 election, a failure to send any sort of message that he wasn’t intimidated or sympathetic to those who attacked the Capitol to attempt a violent coup.
• January 13th, 2021: Rep. Mast votes against the second impeachment of Donald Trump, because the Republican Party no longer feels like they should be accountable for anything, including failed coups that result in the deaths of both their participants and police officers.
• February 4th, 2021: Brian Mast votes to keep Marjorie Taylor Greene’s committee assignments, because he wouldn’t want her to be accountable for all the bigoted remarks and conspiracy theories she’s spread online (probably because she’s a kindred spirit).
• February 25th, 2021: Mast votes against HR 5, the latest version of the Equality Act, that would provide workplace protections for LGBTQ Americans.
• March 3rd, 2021: Rep. Mast votes against HR 1, a bill created to prevent the corruption of money in politics, and protect voter access to the ballot box.
• March 3rd, 2021: Brian Mast votes against the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021.
• March 10th, 2021: Mast votes against the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, because he feels people deserve to die in poverty during a pandemic.
• March 17th, 2021: Rep. Mast votes against the re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act, likely because they feel the 2nd Amendment remaining absolute is more important than preventing people with a history of domestic abuse from owning a firearm (which statistics show, makes them more likely to use those firearms against women in their lives).
• May 19th, 2021: Rep. Mast votes against HR 3233, the creation of a commission to investigate the Capitol Attack.

We would like to add that since our first profile of Brian Mast, he has further tried to embody the “Florida Man” of the GQP, railing against Congressional mask mandates on the House floor, and putting everyone in Congress at risk of Covid-19. This was at a time when only 45% of the Republican caucus was vaccinated, and the Delta variant began surging.

In other words, he’s probably thinking he could one day be elected Governor if he channels Ron DeSantis enough.

Ordinary, run of the mill Qpublicans annoy me enough with their vile antics, but when a scumbag like Mast who once wore the uniform of the Armed Services promptly disgraced it afterwards by acting like a total assclown in the public sector, that really pisses me off. Shitstains like Mast give veterans like me a seriously bad name.

[Jack Dracula]

Never mind. Wrong person.

[Zauriel]

The author of this article says "Andrew Yang's Forward Party is directionless. Yang's new party is an uninspiring mess lacking vision or purpose."

Doesn't anyone agree or disagree with this article?

Former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang on Tuesday announced his new effort to help Americans break free from a stagnant two-party “duopoly”: a new political party he calls the Forward Party.
In his announcement video, Yang decried the scourge of polarization, which he described as the product of incentives in our media and political systems — especially gerrymandering and the way primaries encourage politicians to cater to their base over voters in the center — and suggested a new party is needed to disrupt a competition-stifling political order. He also cited unsourced polling statistics about how most Americans are dissatisfied with Congress and want a third party.
Yang is right that there is widespread disillusionment with Congress and our major political institutions. Trust in them has been declining for many years.

Yang was right about the problems with the current Congress.

[Tendrin]

A third party isn't going to solve the problems of congress. If you want to solve the problem of the House, you need to break the permanent apportionment act of 1929 . Then you need to take away the GOP's minority senatorial veto in the filibuster. Get rid of those two things and they'd do far more than any third party ever would, and moreover, breaking the apportionment act would probably help diversify party membership anyway.

[CSTowle]

The thing to remember is most people don't care much about politics outside of a few pet issues, almost all voters are unfamiliar with most of the positions of the candidates of the parties they typically support (assuming they bother to support one over the other at all), most voters vote straight ticket and so both parties tend to push candidates who adopt and follow the expected policies of their "team", and a lot of what the parties do (and as importantly, what they don't do) is based around the assumption of the continuation of this low information/low effort voter model. Even people like me who are far more into discussing and following politics than your average citizen often (again, like me) have a superficial/inch-deep understanding of the issues and certainly don't have the education or background to get into the minutiae of policy or legislative strategy and at best can seek out analysis from sources that are better suited to break it down and hope for the best in impartiality/lack of bias.

On the one hand it's depressing but understandable, people have kids/mortgages/bills/hobbies/worries and don't have time to get bogged down in what seem like minor details or legalese. It's why hot-button, emotional impact issues are usually the deciding ones and the stuff that impacts us more (taxes, gerrymandering, military budget, healthcare policy, etc.) is considered "boring" and so gets both less airtime and is harder to follow (often by design, law-makers naturally often have a law background and can parse what the definition of "is" is either to make things look boring/unimportant). I think this is why the Daily Show and shows like it had/have an impact. They try to dress up the boring in entertaining ways to get you to think/care/follow these issues.

Single issue candidates appeal to some because people don't have time for complications or lectures. So Yang and his UBI gains a bit (a very little bit) of traction. But he's just this last cycle's version of Steve Forbes and the flat tax. He's attacking the system both because it's flawed (again, by design even from the founding to be slow/ponderous) and because he was a failure within it. It's always much easier to tear something down than to build something or work within the system. It's why you see a lot of talk about revolution from those on the fringes, and not so much on how to successfully run the country long-term or consensus-build. Also, it hits that emotional button. It's theater/attention-getting. The clickbait of politics.

[worstblogever]

The author of this article says "Andrew Yang's Forward Party is directionless. Yang's new party is an uninspiring mess lacking vision or purpose."

Doesn't anyone agree or disagree with this article?

Yang was right about the problems with the current Congress.

Andrew Yang is full of s***. Wanna know how I can obviously tell?

Two days after he decides he's "breaking up with Democrats" when we all knew he never was one truly in the first place, Yang's chilling out with Tucker Carlson.

Even more bizarre in that discussion was the part where Carlson said, "The Unabomber had some good ideas", because Yang didn't have the healthiest response to go, "WTF is wrong with you?"


Yang's a political dead-end.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Andrew Yang is full of s***. Wanna know how I can obviously tell?

Two days after he decides he's "breaking up with Democrats" when we all knew he never was one truly in the first place, Yang's chilling out with Tucker Carlson.

Even more bizarre in that discussion was the part where Carlson said, "The Unabomber had some good ideas", because Yang didn't have the healthiest response to go, "WTF is wrong with you?"


Yang's a political dead-end.

When Yang ran for president last year, I listened to what he had to say and came away unimpressed. Admittedly, it was difficult to get past the image of him as yet another spoiled, arrogant rich guy who thought he could come out of left field with zero political experience and win the most important office in the land like Trump had done. I guess the reason Yang didn't just become a Qpublican was because he knew the legions of racists in the party wouldn't give him the time of day, never mind votes.

[Mister Mets]

A third party isn't going to solve the problems of congress. If you want to solve the problem of the House, you need to break the permanent apportionment act of 1929 . Then you need to take away the GOP's minority senatorial veto in the filibuster. Get rid of those two things and they'd do far more than any third party ever would, and moreover, breaking the apportionment act would probably help diversify party membership anyway.

Do you think there should be more members of the House, or is there another result of the permanent apportionment act of 1929 that you'd like to change?

[Tendrin]

Do you think there should be more members of the House, or is there another result of the permanent apportionment act of 1929 that you'd like to change?

There absolutely should be more members of the House.

[babyblob]

Trump has nothing to hide when it comes to the 6th. He did nothing wrong. Yet he tells four aides to ignore a subpoena from the House committee probing the Jan. 6 Capitol attack and signaling he will go to court to block their testimony to the investigators.

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/1...ubpoena-515593


Yep these are the actions of a man with nothing to hide.