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

[Tendrin]

Really, the Dems need to pound GOP extremism in the midterms. There's a lot of ground there that has been correctly pointed out is not being properly utilized, especially compared to what the GOP does to even moderate Dems.

[worstblogever]

The fact is that a lot of right-wing militia and other goons on the right ecosystem in the current age haven't been able to, or achieved any success in their attempts to, develop anything on that level.

The "Unite the Right" rally at Charlottesville was a huge failure and embarrassment which actually made Virginia even more blue, and started the confederate statue removal wave. The militia attempt to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer was a laughing stock. Steve Bannon who too many people wasted time thinking about was a hack who lost Alabama to the Dems, got kicked out early by Trump, got caught by the Post Office, and it's pretty clear now that it was Trump and never him that carried and drove that movement to power.

Trump by himself and through himself alone mobilized something on the scale of the January 6 Putsch. He did it because he had Presidential power and immunity to use and abuse at his pleasure, a corrupt collaborationist GOP who he sees as canon fodder. There have always been and always will be right-wing figures on the fringe. And it's not a given or inevitable that the fringe can be actioneered by just anyone.

This post really underlines that there is no single event of domestic terror Trump's supporters have carried out, and that he's never seriously criticized ANY of the three events listed here. Hell, he "both sides" after Charlottesville, and he had posts where he kept deriding Gov. Whitmer AFTER people were arrested with plans to kidnap her, which was a tepid endorsement of their actions. Multiple outlets are reporting he thinks he's going to be "reinstated" by August to avoid jail right now, and the GQP are still feeding lies to potential stochastic terrorists to potentially carry out future endeavors.

I have seen it commented that the GOP is no more. They are now the GQP, and they are not operating as a political party, but as an insurgency.

[Tami]

This Undercover Operative Says She Recruited the Proud Boys for the GOP

A transgender poker player and progressive activist who went undercover and cozied up to right-wing extremists. A state Republican party desperate to see Donald Trump win. A Vegas-based GOP consultant. The Proud Boys.

This is the bizarre story connecting a far-right paramilitary group to an effort in Nevada to pressure election officials to overturn the 2020 election results.

In the months leading up to the 2020 election, Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, a self-described progressive activist, embedded herself in GOP circles as part of her research for a book on right-wing extremism. What she found was a Republican consultant desperate to team the Proud Boys up with the Nevada GOP in order to challenge ballots and flip the presidential election.

“These guys were too stupid to look into my progressive politics,” Ashton-Cirillo told The Daily Beast in a phone interview this week, “because they were so eager to tokenize me.”

[WestPhillyPunisher]

'I thought I was going to lose my life': Capitol Police officers share their harrowing January 6 stories for the first time

THIS is why there should absolutely be a 1/6 commission, bipartisan or otherwise, and have it televised nationwide so the whole damn country can hear stories like these. In addition, facts need to be gathered to determine what happened before the Capitol was stormed, after the building had been breached followed by the aftermath. No way in hell should this be swept under the rug, no matter how much Qpublicans want that to happen, the truth has to be uncovered, once and for all.

[worstblogever]

This Undercover Operative Says She Recruited the Proud Boys for the GOP

She kept all the receipts. Paul Gosar asking for a contingent of Proud Boys to assemble outside a ballot-counting office in Phoenix is pretty big. Nevada GOP aligning themselves with the Proud Boys is very big.

Even outside of the gender reassignment, she might be the bravest person in the country right now for infiltrating both the GQP and the Proud Boys. With the latter, her life could have been in danger if they didn't stop to think about her political history.

Professional poker player... the "bluff" skills and her poker face have to be elite.

[babyblob]

Just got an automated call from The Young Republicans of America asking for a donation. That doesnt bother me. Groups do that all the time. What bothered me was when they said that my households vote for Trump in the election (My aunt voted for Trump and I voted for Biden.) showed that I cared about America and upset at Biden rolling back everything Trump did.

My question is do they really know that some one in my house voted for Trump or is it just something they say to everyone and hope they get a bite?

[Malvolio]

Just got an automated call from The Young Republicans of America asking for a donation. That doesnt bother me. Groups do that all the time. What bothered me was when they said that my households vote for Trump in the election (My aunt voted for Trump and I voted for Biden.) showed that I cared about America and upset at Biden rolling back everything Trump did.

My question is do they really know that some one in my house voted for Trump or is it just something they say to everyone and hope they get a bite?

They may have gotten your phone number by your aunt giving it to them via some conservative website. They assume that anyone giving out their phone number in such a way must have voted for Trump.

[AnakinFlair]

Trump's Facebook ban is now only for 2 years.

[babyblob]

They may have gotten your phone number by your aunt giving it to them via some conservative website. They assume that anyone giving out their phone number in such a way must have voted for Trump.

I dont think that is it. My aunt is respectful about not giving out my info like my name, phone number, address and such. She has a po box she gets all her GOP nut job mail at and uses her phone for her call lists and GOP friends. In the 3 years she has lived here she has not gotten a call on my home phone.

I just didnt know if the voting results were public or something.

[babyblob]

Trump's Facebook ban is now only for 2 years.

Just in time for 2024. Great.

[AnakinFlair]

I dont think that is it. My aunt is respectful about not giving out my info like my name, phone number, address and such. She has a po box she gets all her GOP nut job mail at and uses her phone for her call lists and GOP friends. In the 3 years she has lived here she has not gotten a call on my home phone.

I just didnt know if the voting results were public or something.

Maybe it read your IP address? Or it could be like those personalized ads- did your Aunt use your computer?

[babyblob]

Maybe it read your IP address? Or it could be like those personalized ads- did your Aunt use your computer?

No. She is on my home wireless network. Maybe thats it?

I think I am making a bigger deal out of it. I just didnt know if voters records were public. Like that is how they got the. No biggie.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Trump's Facebook ban is now only for 2 years.

Just in time for 2024. Great.

Yeah, I thought the same thing. I guess Marky Z and his henchmen just can't quit Trump.

[Mister Mets]

I dont think that is it. My aunt is respectful about not giving out my info like my name, phone number, address and such. She has a po box she gets all her GOP nut job mail at and uses her phone for her call lists and GOP friends. In the 3 years she has lived here she has not gotten a call on my home phone.

I just didnt know if the voting results were public or something.

An individual's voring results are not public.

Whether someone voted is public. That could be used in a variety of ways.

They might determine that the majority of people in your election district voted for Trump, and therefore figure it's worth a shot asking you to contribute.

They may also determine that you live in a household where someone else is a member of Republican Group X, and figure that it's worth a shot asking you to contribute.

Information about your age is probably readily available, so they could easily figure that a relatively young white guy in that area and/ or in the household of member of Republican Group X is more likely to be sympathetic to the Young Republicans than someone selected randomly could be.

It may also be that whoever they came up with the list of potential people to ask for money did a really bad job of it. That said, it is probably worth it for them to get a lot of "No" responses for one yes, because the one "yes" represents a potential recurring donor going forward.

Damn right the tradeoff was worth it. Secondhand talk from flacks and sycophants can be dismissed as nonsense, but giving Trump back his favorite social media platform would almost certainly run the risk of touching off Capitol Riot 2.0 since he'd waste zero time stirring up his fanatics and urging them to stage a second attack.

One distinction is that it's harder to do anything about something reported through secondhand knowledge. This really stupid thing Trump almost certainly did is reported a bit differently than if Trump were unfiltered on Twitter.

That said, as you note, it's more immediately harmful if he's able to say it unfiltered on Twitter. And if he tried to be active in some way going forward, he would probably be asked about it, which increases the possibility that a witness could forward to confirm the story.

But trump Jr. admitted that the trump tower meeting with the Russians was to collude with Russia. That was after trump asked Russia to hack Clinton's e-mails; which I would say makes him a traitor since, I believe, asking a foreign power to attack your political opponent is treason.

There's some argument that the Trump Jr meeting was against election law, but that's not the equivalent of saying it was treason, or even collusion.

https://www.factcheck.org/2018/08/tr...n-and-the-law/

This chain of posts kicked off with a specific claim that Trump Sr cheated to steal the election.

I'm aware that was not your post, but that raises some different questions. What are the implications of the claim Trump Sr cheated? How did he cheat? What should elected officials have done about this? Keep in mind that whatever someone say should be permissible for Democrats would become permissible for Republicans who think the election was stolen from Trump

[Mister Mets]

Well if the Big Bang didn't happen, if the meteor didn't kill the dinosaurs...yada yada yada...

Expert fudging of the issue as always.



Warnock and Ossoff's wins happened when the Sen. Majority was on the ballot in a red state, in a situation heavily favoring the GOP. That's obviously not convenient for you to acknowledge, their runoff campaign was specifically painted by them and their opponents as a referendum on who should get to hold the levers on Biden's agenda.

The Senate Majority of 2020-2021 wasn't on the ballot in 2018 when Sinema defeated McSally you know, or at least you should know.



Ah...so this is the fanfiction you've been writing in your mind recently, so cute.



It doesn't highlight them as having a significant role, or even being the protagonists of reality as you seem to assume. To the extent every little vote counts in a democracy, no more no less, obviously it played a role. That's not the same as what you seem to assume which is giving them a starring role in Biden's victory.



Nobody died during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but the nuclear apocalypse that almost happened and didn't is a major event of the 1960s. The Capitol Putsch was a minute or so away from becoming a massacre of lawmakers but the fact that far more died than during the Cuban Missile Crisis is obviously not a concern for you.

I recommend again a warm embrace of reality, for your health and comfort.

If you mean to suggest that without Sinema in the Senate, voters may have been less motivated to go for Warnock and Ossoff, I can appreciate the argument.

In the special election, Warnock and Ossoff overperformed their results relative to November. I suspect they were helped by the political environment, where Trump was insisting elected officials find more votes, and where Trump surrogates were talking about how the election was rigged, which could easily demotivate Republican voters.

There was talk about the Senate flipping in 2018. It was mentioned in earlier iterations of this thread. Democrats would have needed to win four more elections, which was possible as four incumbents lost, and Beto O'Rourke came within three points in Texas. So a vote for Sinema came with the understanding that it could be pivotal to helping Democrats flip the Senate.

We may arguing past one another on the starring role question. I'm saying that Republicans pissed off at Trump helped push Biden over the edge. You don't seem to dispute that point. In most elections, reliable partisans are the majority of the vote, but that's usually not enough. Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and every Democrat who lost a close election in a purple state got an overwhelming majority of partisan Democrats. It wasn't enough.

With the Cold War, a situation where world powers were getting ready to nuke one another is pretty bad. As a side note, it is worth noting that many people died as a result of the cold war.

Your comparison between January 6 and the cold war may get to a disagreement that hasn't been settled. Were the capitol riots a bad, embarrassing thing, the result of a lot of things that went wrong? Or was that pretty much the best possible outcome, of something that could have and likely would have been much worse? If we replayed the events of January 6 a hundred times, and most of the time elected officials and other innocent people were murdered, that could require a different response than a scenario where the current result (five idiots got themselves killed; a noble police officer had a stroke) came after some serious mistakes.