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

[Zauriel]

By the time Joe Biden takes the oath and the office, the covid death toll may be very high. But it's not too late to undo some of the damage Trump had done in office.

I hope the Hunter Biden probe by the previous administration's special counsel will not be a hindrance to the new administration's plans for the country.

Biden administration can't dismiss the special counsel without facing some backlash unless the special counsel can be removed due to a conflict of interest or misconduct or dereliction of duty.

[PaulBullion]

Yeah...

When you have that and Lightfoot sitting on footage of the cops raiding the wrong house/Madigan seemingly taking kickbacks from ComEd in Illinois?

I get the desire, but still think that dealing with Dems' own issues is a better use of time in the long run.

Probably the most likely to yield actual results versus blowing through tax money on trying to actually make some of the obvious issues with Trump stick.

wait what

.

[PaulBullion]

No, Trumps illegal, criminal and possibly traitorous behavior as President must come to light.

And wasn't #30 one of those who said that Pelosi made a mistake in focusing the impeachment on the Ukraine scandal instead of going after ALL of Trump's crimes?

Seems all he does is blame Democrats.

[PaulBullion]

So what? Neither Nixon or Ford are Democrats, this idea that Biden is going to pardon TRump is a right wing talking point to play "Both Sides." Biden isn't a Republican.

Plus, "not pardoning Trump" was an actual Biden campaign promise.

[InformationGeek]

I don't understand this at all.

INBOX: @realDonaldTrump has signed an executive order prohibiting new federal buildings from being built in anything other than Neoclassical, Georgian, Federal, Greek Revival, Beaux-Arts, or Art Deco styles. https://t.co/gPbaYk9yEe

[AnakinFlair]

I don't understand this at all.

One of many EO's that will be rescinded in a little over 30 days.

Glad to see he's focusing on the REAL problems in American and not the, you know, STAGGERING DEATH TOLL OF THE PANDEMIC.

[Malvolio]

See, here's where #30's argument falls apart. It's based on a faulty assumption that the Biden Administration will have to prioritize between a focus on police reform and going after Trump's crimes in New York State. But they won't, because they don't have to. NY State Attorney General Letitia James is already on the case. She has already filed numerous charges against Trump that can be run through the courts as soon as Trump is out of office. So Biden can safely focus on police reform while James focuses on Trump's taxes, as well as his other crimes committed in NY.

[SUPERECWFAN1]

Just heard audio on my local all-news radio station of Moscow Mitch formally congratulated Joe Biden as President-elect and Kamala Harris as Vice President-elect. I’m sure Spongedon Whinepants won’t like that.

I don't understand this at all.

One of many EO's that will be rescinded in a little over 30 days.

Glad to see he's focusing on the REAL problems in American and not the, you know, STAGGERING DEATH TOLL OF THE PANDEMIC.

In an article here they brag how they spent "months working on this" as an order. Like...your fucking kidding me right ? During a Pandemic you cared more about buildings in DC. Honestly the people behind this should have stepped in and said , your already looking terrible as hell. Signing an order your gonna brag you spent months on over buildings during 2020's hellish year isn't gonna be best optics.


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...l-architecture

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2014, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" published profiles of Terri Proud, a former member of the Arizona House of Representatives who during the one term she did serve in office, tried to get the Bible taught in public schools, while voting against having classes in the same schools that would teach ethnic studies, and once responded to a constituent's letter to ask why Proud supported a ban on abortion on 20 weeks by telling her that all women having one should be forced to watch a video of the procedure first, and saying "until the dead child can tell me that she/he cannot feel pain, I have no intentions of clearing the conscience of the living - I will be voting YES." Hopefully this means Proud has not sought out necromancers to talk to aborted fetuses. Anyway, when the media began to report on her irrational response, she released a statement that accused Planned Parenthood of running a for-profit industry based on aborted fetuses. After those PR disasters for the Arizona GOP, and against the wishes of Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, Terri Proud was hired in the Women's Services Department of the Arizona Veterans' Services Department, where she gave an interview with the local media where she argued against women in the military, altogether, because they get periods, and was summarily fired for her remarks.

On this date in 2017, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profiled David Gowan, a former House Speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, who served in that body from 2009-2017 before term limits ended his time in the legislature. He’s enough of a boob to have used the incorrect spelling of “Republican principals” rather than “Principles” upon his own campaign website, and in the eight years he was a state legislator in Arizona, Gowan’s name poppped up as a supporter of some of the stupidest legislation to be submitted in the Grand Canyon State, from the anti-immigration law SB 1070 that allowed racial profiling of Latinos, to SB 1610, a bill to name an “official state gun” for Arizona, to HB 2625, which was meant to allow employers the right to reject health insurance coverage for contraceptives for their female employees, to his co-sponsorship of SB 1439, an insane bill that intended to make gold and silver as acceptable legal tender in Arizona, to HB 2284, to allow law enforcement to conduct an unannounced, warrantless search upon any abortion clinic whenever they choose, the Fourth Amendment be damned, to his vote for HB 2643, an attempt by Arizona Republicans to nullify the enforcement of the Affordable Care Act… those are just a few of the extreme pieces of legislation he was attached to. However, the moment that hands-down made him stand out enough to earn a CSGOPOTD profile back in early 2016 was how in January of 2016, Hank Stephenson, a reporter from the Arizona Capitol Times, published a piece about how David Gowan had logged nearly 4,800 miles on a state-issued vehicle over only a 19 day span. Some of the events he traveled to were related to Gowan driving around to campaign for a seat in U.S. Congress to represent Arizona’s 1st Congressional District, that he was running for in 2016, and using a state vehicle for that purpose is against the law. Gowan, as a result, was required to reimburse the state more than $12,000, and his office ended up under investigation by Arizona’s Attorney General for misuse of public resources. Gowan held a grudge and after two unsuccessful attempts at banning Hank Stephenson specifically from the floor of the Arizona House of Representatives, he made a third attempt that was peculiar to many, as moved to implement a new policy requiring reporters who want to cover the legislature from the House floor to undergo rigorous background checks (but still not for anyone purchasing a firearm), including an examination of their criminal, civil, and driving records. Gowan’s new policy goes as far as to list specific offenses, including misdemeanor ones like trespassing, which would automatically disqualify a reporter from being on the House floor for up to 10 years. And guess what? Hank Stephenson was convicted of misdemeanor trespassing following a bar fight he was in a couple years prior. Reporters who covered Arizona’s state legislature stuck by Stephenson, and began reporting from the capitol balcony to avoid submitting background checks while legal challenges to Gowan’s policy mounted. Gowan tried claiming the move was to ensure the safety of legislators, and when opponents to the move pointed out that no legislator had been attacked in the capitol going back decades, Gowan invoked 9/11 to justify his attack on journalists, saying, “There had never been an attack on 9/11 either, like that occurred either, before on our shore. But it did.” On the bright side, as a result of Stephenson’s reporting, and likely, his treatment of that reporter after the fact, karma came in the form of a last place finish in the primary for Arizona’s 1st Congressional District in 2016, and David Gowan is, at least for the time being, out of office.]

In 2015, 2016, and 2018, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" published profiles of Arizona Secretary of State Michelle Reagan, who prior to winning that office, was a member of the Arizona State Legislature from 2002-2015, first with eight years in the Arizona House of Representatives and then with four in the Arizona State Senate. As a legislator, Reagan supported “religious freedom” legislation to allow for the legal discrimination of LGBTQ citizens and bans on same sex marriage, voted to allow employers to refuse to provide health insurance coverage for contraception, tried to extend waiting periods for divorces, supported disastrously ineffective drug testing for welfare recipients (always overturned by courts as unconstitutional), co-sponsored the anti-immigrant law SB1070, tried to make English the official language in Arizona (in spite of such laws being repeatedly overturned by the courts as unconstitutional, including in Arizona in 1998), co-sponsored Arizona’s version of a “Birther Bill”, tried to prevent the implementation of the United Nations’ Agenda 21 treaty based on paranoid conspiracy theories, and voted for a bill that would allow for surprise unannounced inspections of abortion facilities (which was overturned for being a flagrant violation of the 4th Amendment). After a single term as a state senator, Reagan filed to run for Arizona Secretary of State. During the lead up to the election, she was asked by reporters about her votes to support both Arizona's "Birther Bill", as well as Arizona's "religious freedom" law to allow discrimination towards gays. After an awkward pause, all she could muster was to meagerly say,"I just think that we just need to follow the state laws, and the state laws are pretty clear and, um, what is required in state law is what needs to be followed," she said. "As secretary of state, the laws are very clear." Michelle Reagan, since taking office, she has begun using the power of her office to try and prevent the release of information by dark-money donors, announcing in late May 2015 that she would not enforce Arizona election law to do so, and declaring the law unconstitutional (which is for the courts to decide, actually). If that's not brazen enough for you, she then also threatened to sue the Clean Elections Commission if they themselves researched where the dark money in politics was coming from to create political ads.(I'm no public relations expert... but when you're threatening to sue a "clean elections" organization, frankly, you look like you're supporting dirty ones, don't you?) That might be precisely the main interest that Michelle Reagan has, as she's also trying to intervene to prevent Arizona's legislative map from being re-districted by the non-partisan Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission. She also insists there is massive “voter fraud” out there, despite a lack of evidence to prove it, and thus keeps calling for stricter Voter ID laws, that could disenfranchise even more voters in Arizona. Michelle Reagan continued to find her name in the news a lot during the 2016 elections. First, after abysmally long lines to vote in the primaries of the 2016 election that she somehow was not prepared for, she feigned ignorance about the difficulties, and accidentally blurted out that her actions were meant to suppress the vote, before blaming the lines on people actually voting. She was also so breathtakingly bad at her job that she allowed Russian operatives to hack into Arizona’s voting rolls, trying to justify the security breach as “they looked like an employee” in an e-mail sent to her office used to fish their way in, and repeatedly was sued for trying to reject voter registration by Democrats (go figure). She was lucky that the state attorney general of Arizona is a Republican as well, as he launched an investigation into her activities, and deemed them to be not criminal, but decidedly incompetent. And, after all this gross incompetence, and with the Blue Wave mounting, Michelle Reagan was unseated in the 2018 GOP Primary for Arizona’s Secretary of State, earning only 33% of the vote in that race, and getting beat by a 2/1 margin by Steve Gaynor, the man who would go on to be narrowly defeated by new Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2019, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profiled former Arizona House of Representatives member David Stringer, who advanced out of the GOP Primary in the 2016 elections in a conservative Arizona district by all of 700 votes. His time in office was brief, where his only real legislative moves seemed to be to vote for a resolution to declare pornography “a public health crisis”, and to vote for an insane anti-choice bill that would require physicians to attempt to revive “viable” fetuses after an abortion (we used quotation marks because by definition at the age the procedure is permitted, those fetuses would not be viable). David Stringer was infamous not for any legislative action, but instead, for the series of racist statements he made during his brief time in office. In June of 2018, Stringer went on an extended rant where he said immigration was "politically destabilizing" labeling it an "existential threat" that would radically alter US demographics for the worse. He openly groused about how 60 percent of public school students were minorities, so there weren't "enough white kids to go around". That grotesque bit of xenophobia was enough to make even Gov. Doug Ducey, who’s been photographed with white nationalists, call for him to resign for being too racist. David Stringer was supposed to apologize for his remarks at a press conference that he chose to hold at a LoLo’s Chicken & Waffles (really), where yes, he gave a non-apology that amounted to him being sorry if any minorities were offended by remarks he claimed were taken out of context, and did not immediately give a clear answer when asked if he was a white nationalist. Stringer then started channeling white nationalist Congressman Steve King by talking about the benefits of racial “homogeneity”: A few weeks later, David Stringer decided to speak at Arizona State University, and again managed to get racist as hell, claiming that “diversity in our country is relatively new” and giving his opinion that African Americans “don’t blend in because they look different”, before finishing his polluted stream of thought with his observation that "The difference between the Polish-American immigrant and the immigrant from Somalia is the second-generation Polish immigrant looks like the Irish kid and the German kid and every other kid. But the immigrant from Somalia does not." Other than a few Arizona Republicans calling upon Stringer to resign for his racist comments, they didn’t actually do a damned thing about it, and he kept hovering around the legislature for months, waiting for his next chance to blurt out something bigoted. They weren’t about to grow a backbone and actually expel him from his position, and he was going to stubbornly refuse to apologize or leave office. That is, until a 1983 Baltimore Police Department report surfaced that showed David Stringer was arrested for soliciting sex from two underage boys, both under the age of 15, and also was in possession of child pornography. Stringer tried claiming the extensive description given of his disturbing behavior by the victims was false (even though he entered a special plea to the charges that earned him five years’ probation), but resigned in April of 2019 while claiming he was forced out of office and it was “deeply and shamefully offensive to free elections and democratic governance”. This racist old motherf***ing pedophile shouldn’t have passed a background check to work in a school, let alone a state legislature. David Stringer had the gall to run for Yavapai Country Attorney in 2020, but lost in the GOP Primary. As he seems unlikely to ever reach any office again, we will we will set his profile and take a look at another kooky Republican today instead. (Current crazy/stupid scoreboard, is now 946-45, since this was established in July 2014.


Suzanne Sharer

Welcome to what is the 946th original profile here at “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day”, where we’ll be discussing Suzanne Sharer, a 2020 candidate for Arizona State Senate who as you can see above, is into the Trump regime enough to do a free brand deal with Goya products, following the Hatch Act violations of both Donald and Ivanka doing the same. Is she a true believer of the new GOP Death Cult and all its love of conspiracy theories, no matter how insane? Affirmative! She is yet the latest in what has been a too-long line of Republicans we’ve profiled who gave credence to the ridiculous Qanon conspiracy theory that Democrats run underground Satanic rituals where children are kidnapped and sacrificed to harvest fear hormones that are the secret fountain of youth for “globalist” leaders. Y’know, your boiler-plate GOP policy these days. Sharer went a step farther than most, often sharing Qanon articles on Facebook that included the sub-conspiracy theory about how JFK Jr. was going to re-emerge after faking his death to be Donald Trump’s 2020 running mate instead of Mike Pence and reveal even more dirty secrets about the Democratic Party.

Of course, having an account that constantly reposts Qanon nonsense ended up being a less-than-viable 2020 election strategy, especially when social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter started removing accounts peddling it about. Sharer had lived up to her name, shared whatever conspiracy sites offered up, and when she lost hundreds if not thousands of followers during the crackdown, she played the victim and pretended she was deliberately, personally being targeted, responding to a post by white nationalist douchebag Sebastian Gorka with:

“They just took down many followers of mine coincidentally after my Democrat opponent for State Senate decided to attack me for my interest in Q discussions! Called me extreme and radical! This is how the left silences their opposition!”

As mail-in voting began in September in certain states, Suzanne Sharer also began spreading conspiracy theories about it, reposting an easily debunked claim by a Trump supporter that “people where finding thrown away Trump ballets everywhere”, showing a picture of the aftermath of a postal worker quitting his job and leaving letters on the side of the road in New Jersey in 2018 (HINT: NO BALLOTS, and also the guy from New York doesn’t know the difference from voting materials and ballerinas.) Sharer never backed down from her post, even after getting easily fact-checked about it.

Sharer ended up losing in the first year since 1996 that Arizona was a blue state, getting only 42% of the vote in a State Senate District where Republicans traditionally can win. We hope she never escapes the stigma of supporting Qanon, and it plagues her at every attempt to find elected office, because that’s what she deserves.

[Tami]

The truth in Black and white: An apology from The Kansas City Star

Today we are telling the story of a powerful local business that has done wrong.

For 140 years, it has been one of the most influential forces in shaping Kansas City and the region. And yet for much of its early history — through sins of both commission and omission — it disenfranchised, ignored and scorned generations of Black Kansas Citians. It reinforced Jim Crow laws and redlining. Decade after early decade it robbed an entire community of opportunity, dignity, justice and recognition.

That business is The Kansas City Star.

Before I say more, I feel it to be my moral obligation to express what is in the hearts and minds of the leadership and staff of an organization that is nearly as old as the city it loves and covers:

We are sorry.

Inside The Star, reporters and editors discussed how an honest examination of our own past might help us move forward. What started as a suggestion from reporter Mará Rose Williams quickly turned into a full-blown examination of The Star’s coverage of race and the Black community dating to our founding in 1880.

Today The Star presents a six-part package. It is the result of a team of reporters who dug deeply into the archives of The Star and what was once its sister paper, The Kansas City Times. They pored over thousands of pages of digitized and microfilmed stories, comparing the coverage to how those same events were covered in the Black press — most notably by The Kansas City Call and The Kansas City Sun, each of which chronicled critical stories the white dailies ignored or gave short shrift.

Our reporters searched court documents, archival collections, congressional testimony, minutes of meetings and digital databases. Periodically, as they researched, editors and reporters convened panels of scholars and community leaders to discuss the significant milestones of Black life in Kansas City that were overlooked or underplayed by The Star and The Times.

[AnakinFlair]

Well, this is interesting...

Barr says there is no need for a Special Counsel on either Hunter Biden or election fraud.

Of course, there is no guarantee the next guy won't do it anyway to appease Tang the Conquerer, but it would look awfully bad if they did.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

In an article here they brag how they spent "months working on this" as an order. Like...your fucking kidding me right ? During a Pandemic you cared more about buildings in DC. Honestly the people behind this should have stepped in and said , your already looking terrible as hell. Signing an order your gonna brag you spent months on over buildings during 2020's hellish year isn't gonna be best optics.


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...l-architecture

Like I’ve said, Trump has long since washed his hands of the virus and just plain doesn’t give a damn about it anymore. Hell, it wouldn’t surprise me if he decides not to get the vaccine because that would run counter to his narrative about COVID being a hoax cooked up by Democrats.

[Mister Mets]

I don't understand this at all.

This has been a priority of his for a while. It makes sense that a real-estate developer would care about it.

It comes down to a pushback against modernist architecture.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...-again/606829/

The classicists behind the draft order hope to address a problem that the architecture establishment does not see as a problem. The nonproblem problem is this: After World War II, the federal government adopted modernism in its many variations as a kind of house architectural style, and as a consequence has managed to build a very large number of unlovely buildings.

Many of these structures now scar the otherwise classically designed streetscape of Washington, D.C. They include such infamous examples as the J. Edgar Hoover F.B.I. Building, which is even more obnoxious than its namesake, along with the Hubert H. Humphrey Health and Human Services Building and the former Housing and Urban Development headquarters, which one former employee deathlessly described as “ten floors of basement.” The government has extended the reach of its bad taste beyond the capital and into the provinces, with federal courthouses that don’t embody the law’s majesty but instead express contempt for ordinary taste or, just as often, advertise the architect’s cleverness.

Why is this a problem? Willful, preventable ugliness is always a problem to one degree or another. Here the ugliness involves the self-conscious repudiation of commonly accepted notions of proportion, accessibility, appropriateness, and coherence. The problem doubles when the ugliness is created by government agencies spending the public’s money while in thrall to a special interest like the architecture establishment—in this case, the architects who design the government’s buildings, the critics who praise them, the academics who try to explain them, the trade associations that drape them in awards, and the wealthy civic boosters who like showing up for the ribbon cutting. Everyone wins except for the people who have to visit, work in, pay for, and look at the result.

To supporters of the draft order, the solution to this problem is simple: The way to get people to stop constructing ugly public buildings with government money is to insist that they use government money to design handsome buildings instead. Great buildings, like great architects, are rare, but certain styles of architecture lend themselves to a higher level of tolerable mediocrity than others. In the now defunct International Style, for instance, there is a vertiginous drop-off in quality between the Seagram Building, which shows the style at its dazzling zenith, and the scores of hurried, ill-proportioned Seagram wannabes that have pockmarked the downtowns of every midsize American city since the early 1970s.Supporters of the proposed executive order believe that classical architecture is closer to being idiot-proof. The style is much more likely to result in pleasing buildings, even when designed by less-than-first-rate practitioners. On his worst day—hungover, kids sick, car in the shop, wife not speaking to him—the least talented classical architect is unlikely to produce anything quite as forbidding and hostile to human life as, let’s say, the Hirshhorn Museum on the National Mall.

Classicism is also much more likely than the Hirshhorn’s brutalism or other postwar styles to produce a building admired by the public—the people who are, we shouldn’t forget, not merely the consumers but also the financial backers of government buildings. Although no truly definitive measures of the public’s taste in architecture exist, the American Institute of Architects conducted the closest thing to an authoritative poll of laymen in 2007. In the list of “150 favorite pieces of American architecture,” modernist buildings fared poorly; another 70 or so modern buildings that respondents considered didn’t crack the list at all. It’s safe to say public taste runs toward the traditional.

It's a weird priority at this stage, as Biden could just quickly reverse it.

[PaulBullion]

This has been a priority of his for a while. It makes sense that a real-estate developer would care about it.

That's not how you spell "fascist".