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

[Farealmer]

But you know, I was just reading earlier, in a different forum, all these accounts from women who were telling stories about harassment they've experienced in public -- things said, and in some cases being touched, actually sexually assaulted in public, when none of the other people around did anything. And I don't know that any of us deciding we are Batman or Punisher in real life is the answer ... but I am also not comfortable with the idea that the best thing we can ever do is keep our heads down, and hope nothing worse happens.

Of course. I think Tami said it best.

There are times to take action and do something, even if it is just pulling out your cell phone and video recording what is going on. I'm not advocating to never get involved, and I think that Farealmer would agree as well. It's only that you need to assess the situation and proceed with some degree of caution when possible.

Like I said earlier have a plan if things go wrong. This day and age people are too often looking for an excuse. Fight back if possible but please do it smart and safely. We need more good people alive in this world, not dead.

[CaptainEurope]

Attachment 108855
Be careful out there everybody if you ever plan to confront people about social justice.

Also another example of white-on-white crime.

[SquirrelMan]

Sorry, Karen: Troy Carter wins Louisiana special election in blow to progressives

State Sen. Troy Carter, who was backed by top leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus, beat state Sen. Karen Carter Peterson in a runoff to fill a vacant House seat that quickly turned into a turf war for sparring factions of the Democratic party. He overcame more than a million dollars in outside spending backing Peterson to win, 56 percent to 44 percent, when The Associated Press called the race.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2015, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" posted profiles about Christine Jones, a former member of the Arizona State Legislature, a candidate for Arizona Governor in 2014, and a failed Congressional candidate for Arizona’s 5th District in the U.S. House of Representatives. She ran in spite of the fact that she was previously arrested for DUI, and that she was a former GoDaddy.com executive who tried dodge criticism for the company’s exploitive ads by saying “she didn’t like them”, even though was actually IN one of them alongside Danica Patrick. She also was caught lying badly about super racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio, trying to claim he was just misunderstood, and a nice guy who puts barrels of water out near the border for illegal immigrants to survive on while he’s catching them (completely untrue), and talked about how immigrants were crossing the Rio Grande and into Arizona, which is amazing because that river does not geographically exist anywhere within the state. Her immigration plan was completely moronic, trying to use the National Guard as extra border patrol agents, but not realizing that doing so wouldn’t be free, and would cost her state $110 million annually. Finally, Jones tried winning over gun enthusiasts by giving an interview where she bragged about her skill with firearms, claiming she enjoyed squeezing off rounds with one arm, or even her eyes closed, which would make her a better shooter in low visibility, or so she said. Jones not only failed to win office in the past two elections, but said enough dumb things to spook even normally deep red Arizona Republicans away from her.

On this date in both 2016, as well as 2017, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" posted profiles about Frank Guinta, who served two non-consecutive terms in Congress, winning office in 2010 and 2014. Not long after he returned to the capitol, however, a report broke that Guinta, way back in his first run for Congress back in 2010, received illegal campaign funding donations… from his parents. That’s right, it seems Guinta lied for years about where $355,000 in contributions came from, and after trying to fib about it for forever and a day, finally got pinned to the wall, admitted it, and was fined by the Federal Election Commission. The scandal tarnished Guinta enough that Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire called on him to resign, and harmed his overall future in politics. Supposedly, Frank Guinta is considered by some to be a Republican moderate, but I find that hard to believe, considering he’s a climate change denier, his stance on abortion is hard to the right, with “Life begins at conception”, indicating that he’s opposed to birth control (with votes that back that up), and is a major hard-liner on immigration, back in 2010, calling for immigration enforcement that was beyond harsh… it was his suggestion that we just ignore the 14th Amendment and deport the children of undocumented immigrants with their parents (which is, y’know, unconstitutional and all). The rest of his voting record is hardly a sign that Guinta’s anywhere near the middle of the spectrum on the issues, including two separate votes to defund Planned Parenthood, votes against raising the Debt Ceiling limit, and a vote for an amendment to be added to the Constitution to ban same sex marriage. Frank Guinta was sent packing from Washington, D.C. yet again by U.S. House Rep. Carol Shea-Porter in 2016, who topped him by just about 5,000 votes for the highly-contested seat in New Hampshire’s 2nd. With a multitude of scandals and his latest loss going into a Blue Wave year in 2018, Frank Guinta opted to not run for re-election in 2018

[worstblogever]

Anthony Kern

On this date in 2018, 2019, as well as 2020, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” published its original profile of Anthony Kern, a member of the Arizona House of Representatives from District 20 who was first elected to office in 2014, usually by running second behind fellow GOP legislator Paul Boyer in that district. It wasn’t until Kern was into his second term in office that he managed to earn our notice here at CSGOPOTD, and that’s because only a few weeks after he was sworn in, he decided to go to a Trump rally in Phoenix to speak, and where he brought out the “LOCK HER UP!” rhetoric against Hillary Clinton four months after the election not just as a colorful chant, but something he actually suggested needed to be revisited as an actual policy. More interesting was that this rally featured several members of the anti-government militia group, the Oathkeepers, and people baying out other great opinions, like beginning “liberal genocide” and the deportation of either all Muslims or all Jews from America. Y’know, nothing that would seem at all like the sort of thing Neo-Nazis would be yelling out loud, unprompted.

That wasn’t the first time Kern faced some sort of controversy, though. Back in his first few weeks in office in 2015, co-sponsored Arizona’s HR 1445, a law meant to conceal the name of whatever police officer should kill a suspect in the line of duty from the public for at least 90 days. Now, that law in and of itself seems pretty fascist and extreme, given the wide swath of police killings in the past few years. But it’s not the bill that stirred up controversy. It was the fact that Kern lied during debate on the bill and claimed to be a “certified peace officer”. Shocker, the media did some checking, and could not find a record of Kern being a police officer, let alone having any sort of certification to be one.

So… yeah, we think speaking at what amounted to a hate rally and helping to work the crowd into frothing madness is enough alone to get Anthony Kern a profile here. There’s also the fact that he chose to give Donald Trump a tongue bath a few months after getting on our radar, celebrating Trump’s executive order to reverse every executive order Barack Obama made to combat climate change, and whining about how the coal industry had “suffered”, which is an odd choice of energy to support in a state that’s famous for getting SUN all the time, y’know?

And over the past three years, Anthony Kern’s voting record has shown us he’s definitely the sort of Arizona Republican worthy of a CSGOPOTD profile:

• February 3rd, 2015: Anthony Kern co-sponsors HB 1445, the bill to conceal the names of police officers who murder suspects for at least 90 days.
• February 18th, 2015: Kern votes for HB 2173, a lunatic bill written to legalize gold and silver as legal tender in Arizona.
• March 11th, 2015: Anthony Kern votes for HB 2643, an attempt by Arizona Republicans to nullify the Affordable Care Act.
• February 29th, 2016: Kern votes for HB 2338, a bill written to allow the legalization of concealed carry near public schools, which we are certain would make the parents of Arizona schoolchildren must feel much safer about their kids’ well-being.
• March 28th, 2017: Anthony Kern votes for SB 1122, which would allow the sale of firearms without any background check (ignoring federal law again).
• March 29th, 2017: Kern votes for SB 1367, an insane anti-choice bill aimed at forcing abortion providers to have to attempt to revive a “viable fetus” after an abortion, which ignores the fact that the way the law is already written, no fetus viable outside the womb can be aborted.
• February 25th, 2019: Kern votes for HCR 2009, to declare pornography is a public health crisis.
• April 10th, 2019: Anthony Kern is one of five Republicans who votes against SB 1346, which would authorize sex education teachers in Arizona schools to teach students about HIV prevention.
• February 6th, 2020: Kern votes for HB 2084, to allow private businesses to go ahead and build parts of a wall along the U.S./Mexico border.
• March 3rd, 2020: Anthony Kern votes for HB 2706, to ban transgender girls from participating in high school sports designated for females.

Now, we have kind of a big update on Anthony Kern, as in 2019, he sponsored legislation that would allow law enforcement to have their name removed from “The Brady List”, which is a database of law enforcement officials kept who are suspected of repeated dishonesty. Now, while we’ve already established that Kern, a former peace officer, seems to like the idea of Arizona being a fascist state where the police can do whatever they want, and that he’s a liar… lo and behold it turned out he had a selfish reason for wanting to have names taken off the Brady list… HE’S ON IT.

Not only did Kern sexually harass a co-worker back in 2010, he once lied to law enforcement officials that he had already worked to pay them back for a department laptop he “lost”. Now, he was trying to revise history so that none of that would ever be reported on…

In December of 2019, he faced calls to be stripped of his leadership of committees in the legislature for making homophobic statements, and referring to sex education as “pornography”:

”Do you want LGBTQ Rights to take over? You want your kids being taught sex education — that you pull up a computer right now —I can pull up, you know, Pornhub.com ... I could pull it up and show you anything on that porn site is what is going to be taught to your kids, your little kindergartners.”

The controversies were apparently enough to see Anthony Kern bounced out of office in 2020 by about 2,000 votes. His road to returning to office might even be more difficult than that, as he is currently the subject of investigation by the FBI because he was present at the U.S. Capitol on 1/6/21 for Trump supporters’ violent coup attempt. At this time, Kern has not cooperated with public records requests to release his text messages in the build-up to the attack, which are considered the public record as long as they still serve as legislators (and he still did at the time). At this time, we would like to wish this fascist our finest “good riddance” salutes and hold out some glimmer of hope that if he was a participant on 1/6, he’ll be carted off to jail.

[worstblogever]

Don't know if anyone is noticing the pattern where a lot of folks I've already been profiling as kinda bats*** were the same kind of folks who turned up for the Trump coup attempt.

It's almost like I'm not just listing random members of the GOP like some of their Republican defenders claim, and actually doing the work to research who's really, really kooky.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Don't know if anyone is noticing the pattern where a lot of folks I've already been profiling as kinda bats*** were the same kind of folks who turned up for the Trump coup attempt.

It's almost like I'm not just listing random members of the GOP like some of their Republican defenders claim, and actually doing the work to research who's really, really kooky.

Kooky indeed! I'm sure Democrats look side eye at Qpublicans in Congress they know either supported the "big lie" about the election results or were all in on the 1/6 insurrection.

[worstblogever]

Kooky indeed! I'm sure Democrats look side eye at Qpublicans in Congress they know either supported the "big lie" about the election results or were all in on the 1/6 insurrection.

It sure makes it hard to say "both parties are just as bad" when one of them had elected officials attending a coup attempt. Like, elected Democrats haven't done insurrections since the Confederacy, and now, honoring the legacy of it with monuments is part of the GQP platform.

i.e. They're not both the same. One has lost its collected f'n minds.

[Tendrin]

This article is a good summary of just how bad the Republican Party's voter suppression and election take over laws are.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...?ocid=msedgntp

[WestPhillyPunisher]

This article is a good summary of just how bad the Republican Party's voter suppression and election take over laws are.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...?ocid=msedgntp

Those evil asterisks hijacked your link!

[Tendrin]

Arrggghh noooooo1111111

[Tami]

Sorry, Karen: Troy Carter wins Louisiana special election in blow to progressives

Democrat Troy Carter wins New Orleans-based US House seat

Carter easily defeated Karen Carter Peterson in the race for Louisiana’s only Democrat-held seat in Congress, in a race seen as handing a victory to the more moderate side of the party after Peterson planted herself firmly in the progressive camp. Carter dismissed those comparisons, noting he also had progressive support.

The pair of state senators from New Orleans, who both made previous failed bids for the congressional seat, had only modest policy differences to distinguish them, and the race centered mainly on personality. Carter had the backing, however, of the seat’s predecessor, Cedric Richmond.

[Mister Mets]

Conservatives literally get off at portraying themselves as victims. Not surprising.

This doesn't appear to map perfectly on political ideology.

https://www.jta.org/quick-reads/jere...s-to-auschwitz

[worstblogever]

The GOP's death spiral the past 15 years has had a few moments of self-awareness.

2006: Bush wants to pass immigration reform. Can we get the caucus on board? Because if we don't make headway with minorities and immigrants, we're going to only accelerate electoral math that will keep us from the White House from this point forward. (They fail to get people on board.)
2007-08: Okay, we lost control of the House, but the country's falling apart because of our lack of fiscal oversight on Wall Street. We need to work across the aisle to save this country from the worst Great Depression. But not so much that we get labelled RINOs and get booted out of office. (Cue losing moderates in primaries the next few years.)
2009-2010: A black guy is president. STALL EVERYTHING DEMOCRATS TRY TO DO! NO QUARTER!
2011-2012: Okay, we got the House back. But... is it just me or are a lot of these new guys nuts? Whatever, our obstruction of any legislation will continue to deny Obama a second term! YEAH! Wherever we got people elected, we need to pass Voter ID bills to make sure we have control of state legislatures and can start tweaking the vote so we can swing the presidential election for... Romney? Well, we could do worse...
2013: Well s***, that didn't work. We did an "autopsy" and we realized we lost because we're alienating minority voters a lot. We might want to think about policies that appeal to them.
2014: So... maybe we shouldn't have let Ted Cruz lead us off a cliff with that government shutdown that got super embarrassing. And what was the deal with him palling around with all those militia guys that marched from the WWII Memorial to the White House? That s*** got super weird and racist. Ah, I'm sure Cruz won't make it to a second term in the Senate or anything.
2015: Is it just me or are the incoming mooks we have in Congress getting... getting worse? I heard Boehner is about fed up. We really need to get some people that have a basic understanding of civics in here. But, we've got Jeb lined up to have a shot at the presidency. He's got sensible policies and wants to finish immigration reform. A return to the trusted Bush family name and "kinder, gentler" conservatism is what the country needs. Plus, if he can make an inroads with minorities, that would help a TON. It's not like our party is gonna rally around Trump or anything, right?
2016: S***, these people are gonna pick Trump, aren't they? How is this happening? I keep hearing Russia helped him win the primary. Oh f***. If the public finds out our candidate is in league with Putin, we are right and truly f***ed. But... maybe this is our last shot at the White House, anyway? Like, we never did anything over the past decade to win minority votes. At least aggrieved white dudes like Trump. How bad could he be in charge? With Ryan leading the House and McConnell in the Senate, they should be able to rein him in.
2017: Okay, Trump lost the popular vote, but with the Russians helping, got in with the electoral college. Problem is, he's bats***, and is screaming at anybody who tries to explain to him nearly everything he does is criminal or unconstitutional. We have the House and Senate and White House, let's real quick see what we can do to pass tax cuts for billionaires and get rid of the ACA before the mid-terms. Who knows? Maybe Trump might learn as he goes and not be a madman.
2018: So... Trump fired James Comey only four months into his presidency for not publicly telling everybody there was no Russian interference. This... looks bad. Like, without the Russians, we lost that. The intelligence community is already shutting down ways they can help us again. Maybe... maybe people will be fine if we do a "repeal and replace"? For sure, though, after Charlottesville we need to take a clear stand against white nationalism and not let it creep into our party any more.
2019: F***. That smarts. The public just rejected us in a big way. Paul Ryan just bailed, too. He said Boehner was right, the inmates are running the asylum. There's no way Trump's gonna win in 2020 against any Democrat. Like, we lost the popular vote in '16. Trump was screaming about "election fraud" then. Maybe... maybe he won't teeter on the edge of sanity, and he'll finally run a disciplined campaign? Like, we're already seeing a drift towards white nationalism. We need to be ready to take the moral high road and abandon Trump if he looks like he's dead meat. And hey, all the white nationalists are failing. We need to stop letting bigots and conspiracy theorists onto the ballot. At least the Mueller investigation finally got closed by Bill Barr. Dodged quite a few bullets and they never arrested any Trump, at least.
2020: Okay, so the day the Mueller investigation, Trump called Ukraine's president and tried blackmailing him with Congressionally-approved military aid. And we have to have an impeachment over that. Goddamn it. Why are the wagons circling around this maniac? And why is our party so obsessed with Q? What even is that? Who are we anymore? How did we get here?
2021: That... that got ugly. Not just losing the election, but... holy s***, did Trump really just try and lead a bunch of militia loons and conspiracy nuts to stage a coup? How many of us knew? S***. We're... we're f***ed. It's not just even the racial demographics of voting. The Trump crowd that stormed the Capitol were Neo-Nazis wearing Camp Auschwitz shirts, and NOBODY blinked on our side. Paul Gosar and Matt Gaetz were still digging in and blaming it on Antifa before the vote was certified. And now we have two Qanon people in Congress, and McCarthy can't control them worth s***. Are... are we actually not going to expel these psychos? We're... this is who we are? Well, s***, anywhere we have control of a state government, we need to stop people from voting, especially if it's in a demographic of any kind, racial or otherwise, that trends Democratic. Straight up, the only votes that should be counted are Republican ones. Because if we don't do that, we'll never win anything. We have to do what we can to keep Trump out of jail because right now, our voters want him back for 2024 and they are OBSESSED with him. I dunno why, he's really an ***hole, but they like how he just openly hates POC.


Year by year, the GOP is at a crossroads and when asked to appeal to their conscience and do right by the people, they have opted for the low road at the forked path. There's no sign they plan on starting to take the high road now, either, as all their preferred policies are based on lies, attacking democracy, and inflicting pain on marginalized groups. And they could, have any point, just not done the cruel thing and appealed to more than the worst among them. Fifteen years. Like, I could go back further to lying to start the Iraq War in 2002 and 2003, the GOP Revolution of the 1990s where Gingrich was a partisan s***bag, or the Reagan years where the myth of "trickle down" economics and finding a way to not consider the poor except as maybe getting run-off cash accidentally (and they never did)... but just the last 15 years it's been a descent into fascism, outright.

[Kirby101]

This doesn't appear to map perfectly on political ideology.

https://www.jta.org/quick-reads/jere...s-to-auschwitz

Deleted. My mistake.