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

[WestPhillyPunisher]

The Insurrection Isn’t Over

The Republican Party is increasingly in thrall to the myth that propelled the insurrection. What next? God only knows. This country is STILL in deep trouble as long as the GQP continues pushing that myth to placate Trump and his dangerously rabid base. Meanwhile....

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Rep. Gerry Connolly Calls On Biden To Create Jan. 6 Commission After ‘Cowardly’ GOP Vote

The powerful Democrat urged a presidential investigation into the Capitol riot in lieu of the congressional one blocked by Senate Republicans. Might as well. I'm all for that.

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Texas GOP Puts Final Touches On Sweeping Voting Restrictions

Democrats will have virtually no path to stop it from passing. Disgusting to say the least. Meanwhile....

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Senate To Vote On Election Reform Next Month, Setting Up Another Filibuster Fight

The Senate will vote on S.1, the For the People Act, in June, Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said. The dead LAST thing Qpublicans want is election reform, so let's see where this leads.

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Experts Believe Prosecutors Are Mulling ‘Little RICO’ Mob Law Against Trump Org: Report

Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance Jr. may be looking at Donald Trump’s business as a possible criminal enterprise. That's nice. Wake me when that gets Trump in a courtroom and not before.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2015, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profiled Michael Peroutka, a former member of the Constitution Party who ran for president on that ticket back in 2004, and in 2014, shifted his party to Republican to run for a seat on the Maryland Arundel County Council. While his current political rank might seem pretty low compared to being a one-time presidential candidate, Peroutka is a worthy enough person to profile for his influence, as he has long been a financial supporter of dim-witted Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore, in his quest to violate the separation of church and state that our Constitution guarantees by putting Ten Commandments monuments up in courthouses. But that’s not where Peroutka’s extremism stops… he’s also a long time member of the NeoConfederate group, the League of the South, and when called out on that fact, once responded, “I’m not a Neo-Confederate, if anything I want to be just a True Confederate.” We covered an extensive list of racist and homophobic comments from Peroutka, as well as his calls to arrest all women who get abortions, and using his media profile to claim that Planned Parenthood stalks children and hopes they get pregnant so they can abort their own unborn children. He’s also disgustingly anti-science, to boot, having donated an allosaurus skeleton to a Creationalist museum that teaches children the Earth is only 4,300 years old, and that the Columbine shooting massacre happened because evolution was being taught in public schools. We cannot describe him as terrifyingly bigoted and insane… but at least he doesn’t hold a higher office than he does, currently.


It was in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020, that “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” presented its original profile of the four term U.S. House Representative for Illinois’ 16th Congressional District, Adam Kinzinger, and those who only have followed the most current events are probably like, “WHUH? How the heck is one of the only Republicans rejecting Donald Trump’s bulls*** one of the ‘crazy’ ones?”

Well, our memory goes back a bit farther. We’re talking about a guy who not only bought into the Center for Medical Progress’ bogus “sting” video that illegally taped a Planned Parenthood executive, and compared the fraudulent footage to concentration Camp experiments on conservative talk radio. And it’s part of that sort of reaction that the GOP had that served as a stochastic terror trigger to send a man named Robert Lewis Dear over the edge, and to shoot up a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs. But Kinzinger wasn’t satisfied with the violence his party incited, that day, not at all. During the five hour siege that left three people dead, and many others hospitalized or pinned inside the building, Adam Kinzinger was live on CNN, and said he expected an apology from Planned Parenthood if it turned out they were not the intended target of the shooter. We’ll repeat that… Kinzinger demanded an apology from the organization attacked while there was still gunfire being heard, and an active shooter was still attacking them. Kinzinger has never apologized for his remarks. His voting record also is highly conservative across the board, and not surprisingly, very much so on abortion rights.

And now, the brutally depressing part… in spite of all members of Congress having a pathetically low approval rating, Adam Kinzinger’s heartless comments about victims of a mass shooting while they were still laid up in a hospital, or that Kinzinger that he decided to send out a mailer of him taking a photo with some of his constituents which he used to make an ad mailer touting his pro-life record without their consent…

In 2020, Kinzinger criticized Wisconsin’s Democratic Gov. Tony Evers for removing National Guard troops from the U.S./Mexico border that were requested to be sent there by Donald Trump. Kinzinger is a reservist, and could have faced discipline for publicly criticizing his own orders to stand down. The theory was at the time that he probably only made the statement in the first place to win the approval of Trump, and hope it would allow him to be named Air Force Secretary (maybe he held a grudge when his name didn’t get called)… And as Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic by simply issuing stay-at-home orders to keep the public safe also led to Kinzinger chiming in to be on the wrong side of history.


And his voting record the past two years has still been extremely partisan:

• December 18th, 2019: Rep. Kinzinger 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: Kinzinger votes against the HEROES Act, to further support the healthcare industry and citizens affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.
• February 25th, 2021: Kinzinger votes against HR 5, the latest version of the Equality Act, that would provide workplace protections for LGBTQ Americans.
• March 3rd, 2021: Rep. Kinzinger 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: Adam Kinzinger votes against the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021.
• March 10th, 2021: Kinzinger 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. Kinzinger can’t be bothered to turn up to vote for 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).

Illinois’ 16th District only has a +4 Republican lean in the Cook Partisan Voting Index…. Kinzinger still won re-election in 2020 with 65% of the vote. What you’re seeing in his public statements is a guy who has looked at his own district, seen it’s relatively moderate, and realized he can’t thread the needle of surviving both a GOP Primary challenge from a Trump loyalist and then a general election victory. He’s just been lucky the Republican Party haven’t had a candidate try and knock him off since he “went rogue” and started hurling insults at the former occupant of the Oval Office. But the louder Kinzinger gets, the more likely that will be in 2022.

We’re going to be adamant about the fact that none of the supposed “Republicans with a conscience” who earn the moniker for refusing to go along for the Big Lie are in any way redeemed by that low bar to clear.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

On this date in 2015, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profiled Michael Peroutka, a former member of the Constitution Party who ran for president on that ticket back in 2004, and in 2014, shifted his party to Republican to run for a seat on the Maryland Arundel County Council. While his current political rank might seem pretty low compared to being a one-time presidential candidate, Peroutka is a worthy enough person to profile for his influence, as he has long been a financial supporter of dim-witted Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore, in his quest to violate the separation of church and state that our Constitution guarantees by putting Ten Commandments monuments up in courthouses. But that’s not where Peroutka’s extremism stops… he’s also a long time member of the NeoConfederate group, the League of the South, and when called out on that fact, once responded, “I’m not a Neo-Confederate, if anything I want to be just a True Confederate.” We covered an extensive list of racist and homophobic comments from Peroutka, as well as his calls to arrest all women who get abortions, and using his media profile to claim that Planned Parenthood stalks children and hopes they get pregnant so they can abort their own unborn children. He’s also disgustingly anti-science, to boot, having donated an allosaurus skeleton to a Creationalist museum that teaches children the Earth is only 4,300 years old, and that the Columbine shooting massacre happened because evolution was being taught in public schools. We cannot describe him as terrifyingly bigoted and insane… but at least he doesn’t hold a higher office than he does, currently.


It was in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020, that “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” presented its original profile of the four term U.S. House Representative for Illinois’ 16th Congressional District, Adam Kinzinger, and those who only have followed the most current events are probably like, “WHUH? How the heck is one of the only Republicans rejecting Donald Trump’s bulls*** one of the ‘crazy’ ones?”

Well, our memory goes back a bit farther. We’re talking about a guy who not only bought into the Center for Medical Progress’ bogus “sting” video that illegally taped a Planned Parenthood executive, and compared the fraudulent footage to concentration Camp experiments on conservative talk radio. And it’s part of that sort of reaction that the GOP had that served as a stochastic terror trigger to send a man named Robert Lewis Dear over the edge, and to shoot up a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs. But Kinzinger wasn’t satisfied with the violence his party incited, that day, not at all. During the five hour siege that left three people dead, and many others hospitalized or pinned inside the building, Adam Kinzinger was live on CNN, and said he expected an apology from Planned Parenthood if it turned out they were not the intended target of the shooter. We’ll repeat that… Kinzinger demanded an apology from the organization attacked while there was still gunfire being heard, and an active shooter was still attacking them. Kinzinger has never apologized for his remarks. His voting record also is highly conservative across the board, and not surprisingly, very much so on abortion rights.

And now, the brutally depressing part… in spite of all members of Congress having a pathetically low approval rating, Adam Kinzinger’s heartless comments about victims of a mass shooting while they were still laid up in a hospital, or that Kinzinger that he decided to send out a mailer of him taking a photo with some of his constituents which he used to make an ad mailer touting his pro-life record without their consent…

In 2020, Kinzinger criticized Wisconsin’s Democratic Gov. Tony Evers for removing National Guard troops from the U.S./Mexico border that were requested to be sent there by Donald Trump. Kinzinger is a reservist, and could have faced discipline for publicly criticizing his own orders to stand down. The theory was at the time that he probably only made the statement in the first place to win the approval of Trump, and hope it would allow him to be named Air Force Secretary (maybe he held a grudge when his name didn’t get called)… And as Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic by simply issuing stay-at-home orders to keep the public safe also led to Kinzinger chiming in to be on the wrong side of history.


And his voting record the past two years has still been extremely partisan:

• December 18th, 2019: Rep. Kinzinger 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: Kinzinger votes against the HEROES Act, to further support the healthcare industry and citizens affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.
• February 25th, 2021: Kinzinger votes against HR 5, the latest version of the Equality Act, that would provide workplace protections for LGBTQ Americans.
• March 3rd, 2021: Rep. Kinzinger 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: Adam Kinzinger votes against the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021.
• March 10th, 2021: Kinzinger 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. Kinzinger can’t be bothered to turn up to vote for 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).

Illinois’ 16th District only has a +4 Republican lean in the Cook Partisan Voting Index…. Kinzinger still won re-election in 2020 with 65% of the vote. What you’re seeing in his public statements is a guy who has looked at his own district, seen it’s relatively moderate, and realized he can’t thread the needle of surviving both a GOP Primary challenge from a Trump loyalist and then a general election victory. He’s just been lucky the Republican Party haven’t had a candidate try and knock him off since he “went rogue” and started hurling insults at the former occupant of the Oval Office. But the louder Kinzinger gets, the more likely that will be in 2022.

We’re going to be adamant about the fact that none of the supposed “Republicans with a conscience” who earn the moniker for refusing to go along for the Big Lie are in any way redeemed by that low bar to clear.

Admittedly, I'm not a regular follower of the news, especially when it comes to the asshole activities of Qpublicans (that way lies madness), but I'm surprised an anointed Trump loyalist hasn't already taken aim at Kinzinger.

[Mister Mets]

There's an interesting question on discrimination that doesn't necessarily map onto existing debates perfectly. Should caste be considered a protected class in the United States as a result of discrimination within immigrant communities?

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/25/o...gtype=Homepage

Oppressed castes are a minority within this minority, and they continue to be subject to forms of caste discrimination and exploitation, as the two lawsuits make clear. Together, these cases show how caste operates within America’s racially stratified work force to create largely hidden, yet pernicious patterns of discrimination and exploitation. In both, the litigants are members of the oppressed caste Dalits.

One case is a discrimination suit filed in June 2020 against the technology conglomerate Cisco Systems Inc. and two supervisors by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing on behalf of a Dalit engineer. According to the lawsuit, Cisco failed to adequately address caste discrimination by two privileged-caste supervisors. The Dalit engineer alleges that one of the supervisors “outed” him as a beneficiary of Indian affirmative action. The lawsuit says that when he complained to the human resources department, both supervisors retaliated by denying him opportunities for advancement.

The plaintiff and one of the supervisors are graduates of the Indian Institutes of Technology, a set of elite public technical universities. When the Indian government extended caste-based affirmative action to these colleges in 1973 and 2006, students admitted through the quotas were met with fierce opposition and stigmatized as unworthy of an elite education. The fear of exposure has forced many Dalit students in India to pass as non-Dalits.

[worstblogever]

Admittedly, I'm not a regular follower of the news, especially when it comes to the asshole activities of Qpublicans (that way lies madness), but I'm surprised an anointed Trump loyalist hasn't already taken aim at Kinzinger.

I'm in "wait and see" mode for him getting a primary challenger who's a complete loon. Liz Cheney already got one, so Kinzinger shouldn't wait too much longer.

[babyblob]

What I love are all the GOP lawmakers giving their speech's and tweets for Memorial Day weekend saying how we need to show respect for the veterans and armed forces who let us live in a great democracy and the values of our country when they voted down a commission to look into one of the greatest attacks on our democracy and values in our country.

They can go fuck themselves!

[mathew101281]

How do we counter act voter suppression? We know it’s happening but I don’t see much conversation about counteracting it.

[Mister Mets]

How do we counter act voter suppression? We know it’s happening but I don’t see much conversation about counteracting it.

It depends on the specifics of the situation.

If something is flagrantly illegal, court challenges would be the major option.

If something isn't illegal, the best strategy may be to campaign on the idea that Republicans don't want certain people to vote. That often motivates those groups.

There are some potential extreme strategies. I can't find the article, but I remember reading that an effective voter turnout mechanism is to promise people know that you will publish the names of everyone who doesn't vote in a key election.

[babyblob]

How do we counter act voter suppression? We know it’s happening but I don’t see much conversation about counteracting it.

The only talk I have heard is by going through the courts. But with a GOP controlled SC how well is that going to work?

[JackDaw]

The only talk I have heard is by going through the courts. But with a GOP controlled SC how well is that going to work?

Probably quite well.

I didn’t see the Donald get any favours in his recent multiple court ventures.

[Gray Lensman]

Probably quite well.

I didn’t see the Donald get any favours in his recent multiple court ventures.

John Roberts has never seen a restriction on voting he didn't like. The man's name should go down in history as a synonym for Jim Crow. This is the swing vote on the court.

[Malvolio]

I think the late former Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger put the argument against gun control by the NRA and other groups as one of the "greatest frauds" in the history of our country back in 1991.



It's 30 years later. And somehow, people aren't tired of it being perpetuated yet. Even after the NRA got caught funneling Russian money into the American election.

I like this. We should definitely regulate guns the same way we regulate cars. Have every gun registered and inspected on a yearly or bi-yearly basis. And if you're caught using a gun that isn't registered or failed inspection, you have the gun confiscated and you get fined.

[babyblob]

These people are everywhere. Last nights Mets game.

110076

[WestPhillyPunisher]

These people are everywhere. Last nights Mets game.

110076

Seriously? Man, talk about stupid on steroids!

[Mister Mets]

John Roberts has never seen a restriction on voting he didn't like. The man's name should go down in history as a synonym for Jim Crow. This is the swing vote on the court.

If you're talking about the court's decision with the Voting Rights Act, the main argument was that we shouldn't base the standard on what areas are in need of greater scrutiny on their problems generations ago. Section 5 in 1965 was meant to be temporary.

The court's decision was that Alabama would now be treated the same way as Pennsylvania, so that contemporary information would determine if a place requires different scrutiny.

Things have changed in fifty years since Democrats controlled southern legislatures through racist policies.

There were two potential arguments for Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act being maintained that were not articulated.

The first argument is that these locations (Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, South Carolina, Virginia, handful of counties elsewhere including the Bronx) remain fundamentally racist generations later, and should be held to a higher level of scrutiny. In this case, the argument should be made openly. Anyone against the court's decision should say that Georgia, Arizona and Virginia are obviously racist shitholes, and should be recognized as such by John Roberts.

The other argument is that any restriction on the ability to make it harder to vote is a good thing, even if it's based on treating one state differently than another for reasons that are no longer pertinent, and which are contrary to the original intent of the law. This one doesn't pass constitutional muster, given all the laws about holding jurisdictions to the same standard. But that would be the argument to make.