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

[numberthirty]

So a big issue that led to the tight race is that Biden is having his strings pulled by someone else?
No. What you’re doing is spreading conspiracy BS to erode support in the administration. If you believe it’s really “to each their own” you should keep you’re BS to yourself and stop trying to negatively influence Democratic voters.

No one needs to do that when Dems are losing races or just barely pulling them out.

If people cannot even just accept obvious reality?

Someone "Negatively Influencing Democratic Voters..." is the least of our worries.

[Jack Dracula]

The strings pulled comment was in response to someone suggesting Biden is a "lackey of the Democratic Party or a figurehead." I agree with that and I'm allowed to agree with that. The concern was why aren't D voters showing up the way that was expected and it's waning confidence in the party. Am I supposed to pretend that's not true and hope it simply goes away because someone might get triggered for mentioning it? Gather your balls, dude.
The indictment is real, people wanting to return from Afghanistan is real, and divided House Dems are real. Those elections this week shouldn't have been so tight and if you feel you know why they were, I'm all ears.

EDIT: 20 Dems just decided to abstain from voting on HR 774 and the nay's took it. It's lunacy.

According to you the people pulling the strings are apparently the “Clintons Camp”. If you can’t back up your comments with proof they’re only opinions. Baseless and damaging opinions at that.
You can believe whatever ridiculous BS conspiracy you want, but sharing it in a public forum with potential Democratic voters opens you up to criticism. If you can’t handle criticism “gather your balls dude”.

[Jack Dracula]

No one needs to do that when Dems are losing races or just barely pulling them out.

If people cannot even just accept obvious reality?

Someone "Negatively Influencing Democratic Voters..." is the least of our worries.

Thing is 30, if Dems are losing or barely winning how does touting negative conspiracy theories and eroding confidence in Democratic politicians help that situation?

[numberthirty]

Thing is 30, if Dems are losing or barely winning how does touting negative conspiracy theories and eroding confidence in Democratic politicians help that situation?

You cannot erode confidence that is obviously not there to start with.

While I don't know how much I buy the angle in question?

Just shrugging folks off as conspiracy theorists seem like an ill advised move.

Trying to hold as much of this together as possible seems like it makes more sense.

[JB]

No one needs to do that when Dems are losing races or just barely pulling them out.

If people cannot even just accept obvious reality?

Someone "Negatively Influencing Democratic Voters..." is the least of our worries.

Agreed. Difficult truths but they have to be faced or we're not going anywhere.

According to you the people pulling the strings are apparently the “Clintons Camp”. If you can’t back up your comments with proof they’re only opinions. Baseless and damaging opinions at that.
You can believe whatever ridiculous BS conspiracy you want, but sharing it in a public forum with potential Democratic voters opens you up to criticism. If you can’t handle criticism “gather your balls dude”.

I can handle criticism without issue, I'm unbothered. But calling someone a conspiracy theorist because they have issues with how things are unfolding is typical stuff that doesn't get anyone anywhere.
Someone said he feels like a figurehead and I agreed. I never said it's the Clinton camp but we would be silly to think that Hillary, who ran just 5 years ago and was the secretary of state under Obama and Biden, doesn't have influence, positive or negative.

In any case, one can choose to ignore the glaring issues or not. I've made my choice and you've made yours so I'll leave it at that.

[JB]

20 Dems sitting out says everything. They are always going to have enough votes that are problematic to avoid doing anything big that corporations feel isn't loaded in their favor. Every time. Doesn't matter if there is a super majority or not. There will always be an excuse because the Dems pride themselves on being a big tent party and have been chasing moderate Republicans for 30 years.

I agree with all of the above.
Looks like they're doing an hour of debate to see if they can revive it.

House memo:
"The House has now begun one hour of debate on HR 774 - Rule providing for consider of HR 5376 - Build Back Better.
After debate on the Rule, the House will take votes. These are the last votes for the week.

Next/Last votes predicted: at approximately 9:30-9:45PM, on Concurring in the Senate Amendment or HR 3684 - Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and on the Rule providing for consideration of HR 5376."

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2014, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” we looked at former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett, the first governor in the history of Pennsylvania to only be elected to one term before getting the boot from voters. When you look at his administration, it’s not hard to wonder why, what with pitiful job production numbers, and whose top aides were repeatedly under investigation for everything from having been paid to not do any work to trading pornography on state-owned computers. Corbett himself managed to once go on live television and compare same sex marriage to incest, and when he received complaints from state universities when he slashed their budgets in half, he advised they should drill for oil on campus to earn money to pay off the difference. He also rankled everyday citizens’ rights by signing one of the harshest Voter ID laws in the country into place, as well as a law to drug test welfare recipients, but both were thankfully overturned by judges. Corbett was widely unpopular, particularly among minority voters, and it really didn’t help his case that his campaign was caught by Buzzfeed photo-shopping stock images of minorities into photos with him on the campaign trail to make him seem like he actually was willing to surround himself with them. After being defeated by Tom Wolf in the 2014 elections and becoming the only incumbent Republican governor to lose that year, Corbett apparently decided to retire from politics and return to public life.

It was in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and in 2019, that we published our first two “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day" profiles of Michael Speciale, a member of the North Carolina House of Representatives who has not just supported some of the most extreme legislation the North Carolina GOP sent to the desk of Gov. Pat McCrory from 2012-2014, but as a freshman lawmaker back in 2013, sent out an e-mail accusing William Barber, the head of the North Carolina NAACP of being “racist” and a “race opportunist” because Barber had pointed out how Voter ID legislation in North Carolina was being used to suppress the vote of minorities (and some Republicans have been dumb enough to admit this.) Only a few months later, Speciale made most of the North Carolina legislature question his humanity, outright, when during discussion of a bill to regulate puppy mills, he started mocking suggestions with comments like, “'Exercise on a daily basis’ – if I kick him across the floor, is that considered daily exercise? ‘Euthanasia performed humanely’ – so should I choose the ax or the baseball bat?” He didn't just say that, he went on Facebook and doubled-down on his remarks, saying they were appropriate because he didn't believe in over-regulation. And that wasn't the only time... after he posted inappropriate comments about President Obama being lectured by Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, calling the president an "Islamic son of a bitch", he again doubled down, saying liberals were "pretending" to be offended. (Nobody was pretending, dude.) fBut weeks before the 2014 election, Michael Speciale Jr., his son, was arrested and plead guilty to sexually assaulting two teenaged girls, which is ironic only because Speciale was a co-sponsor of North Carolina's much-loathed HB 2 law, which wanted to force transgender people to use the bathroom of their birth because they were supposedly attacking women in restrooms. Meanwhile his son was the real threat all along. Or maybe he would also be less of a hypocrite if he hadn’t also backed the election of repeatedly accused pedophile Roy Moore for U.S. Senate in Alabama. Speciale won re-election in 2016 with 63% of the vote, and by January 2017, he was back to being an ***hole on his Facebook page, this time commenting on the Women’s March on Washington, D.C. that had more people show up than for the inauguration, but calling those participating “leftists” and their efforts a “joke”, while sharing a video of a conservative commentator who “infiltrated” the march by dressing in drag and commenting that “no one questions, criticizes nor conducts security background checks on trannies.” Speciale was asked about his comments when he finally hosted a town hall six months later in July, and of course, he didn’t back down, even going farther and call the march “disgusting” because the hats the women wear are made to “look like their body parts”(the p****y hats are actually pink cat ears, not actual vaginas, so apparently he’s admitting he doesn’t know what the female anatomy look like). Still, over half the room WALKED OUT in outrage over this moron. And can you blame them? We’re talking about Speciale, who’s such a speciale snowflake that in February 2017, he submitted HB 147, an attempt to reverse North Carolina’s state constitution so they could secede from the union (apparently the lessons learned in the Civil War are lost on this putz) and he actually sponsored HB 780 in April of 2017, a bill that argues North Carolina can still ignore the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges ruling and ban same sex marriage, citing what else, but the 10th Amendment as his justification. While Michael Speciale did win re-election in 2018 after barely surviving a primary challenge and took a shot at the big time in 2019, attempting to win the Congressional seat for the late Congressman Walter Jones in a August 2019 special election. Speciale finished fourth out of a possible seventeen GOP candidates, only getting 9.5% of the vote, and less than half of what the winner did. Speciale then announced that he would not be running for re-election in 2020, and would be calling it quits after two decades in office.

On this date in 2020, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profiled Melissa Moore, who was a candidate for District 46B of the Minnesota House of Representatives in both 2018 as well as 2020. She served as a delegate at both the 2016 and 2020 Republican National Conventions. We are profiling her because, quite simply, she is yet another 2020 Republican candidate for office who is a Qanon conspiracy theorist. On her website, Moore proudly displays a Qanon logo of the Earth resting inside a Q, and when asked by the Associated Press about the stark-raving mad conspiracy directly, commented, ”I like following it. It’s an exciting movement that opens up our minds to different possibilities of what’s going on, of what’s really happening in our world today.” Yes, for her, it’s apparently a matter of enlightenment, and not stupidity. Even when she starts retweeting hashtags to indicate that JFK Jr. is about to re-emerge decades after “faking his death”. Here's the good news… Melissa Moore was running in a blue district, and was going to always be a long shot to win office. Being insane didn’t help, and she lost with only 26% of the vote against Democrat Cheryl Youakim on election night. As she seems highly unlikely to ever reach office, we will set aside her profile at this time to cover another wacky Republican today instead. (Current crazy/stupid scoreboard, is now 1040-50, since this was established in July 2014.


Tracy Lovvorn

Welcome to what is the 1040th original profile here at “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day”, where we’ll be profiling Tracy Lovvorn, who was both a 2018 and a 2020 candidate for U.S. House of Representatives, hoping to knock off Democratic Congressman Jim McGovern. She won the GOP Primary for the seat in 2020 based on the benefit of running unopposed. She also is our latest in a long, long line of Republicans who ran for Congress in 2020 while touting the Qanon conspiracy theory, and to be more specific, she repeatedly posted the QAnon slogan on her Twitter and Facebook campaign accounts, and would occasionally also put “#JFK” along side the “WWG1WGA”, indicating she bought in to the madness enough that she may have thought JFK Jr. was returning from the dead to be Trump’s running mate.

In their 2020 debate, Lovvorn denied McGovern’s claims she disparaged the late Congressman John Lewis after his death (factcheckers proved she did, in fact, attack the civil rights hero), but admitted in the debate she thought the Black Lives Matter movement was “Marxist terrorist organization”, because what do words even mean?

Tracy Lovvorn lost to McGovern on election day, failing to get even 35% of the vote. Massachusetts’ 2nd District remains in safe and sane hands.

[mathew101281]

Interesting alternate history thought exercise. What if Mitt Romney had won the presidency 2012?
Pros: Trumpism might not have happened in the way it did.
Cons: America first Black President would have been a one term president and all that entails.

[Jack Dracula]

Agreed. Difficult truths but they have to be faced or we're not going anywhere.



I can handle criticism without issue, I'm unbothered. But calling someone a conspiracy theorist because they have issues with how things are unfolding is typical stuff that doesn't get anyone anywhere.
Someone said he feels like a figurehead and I agreed. I never said it's the Clinton camp but we would be silly to think that Hillary, who ran just 5 years ago and was the secretary of state under Obama and Biden, doesn't have influence, positive or negative.

In any case, one can choose to ignore the glaring issues or not. I've made my choice and you've made yours so I'll leave it at that.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist but....Hillary tho.

No one needs to do that when Dems are losing races or just barely pulling them out.

If people cannot even just accept obvious reality?

Someone "Negatively Influencing Democratic Voters..." is the least of our worries.

The reality of the situation is what I'm talking about. The reality is the GOP is actively dismantling the democratic election process and mid-terms are one short year away.
I'm not saying the Democratic leadership shouldn't adapt and overcome. I'm saying spreading nonsense about Hillary and encouraging unrealistic dissatisfaction among Democrats isn't helpful. Unless your goal is to help get Trump re-elected.

[numberthirty]

...

The reality of the situation is what I'm talking about. The reality is the GOP is actively dismantling the democratic election process and mid-terms are one short year away.
I'm not saying the Democratic leadership shouldn't adapt and overcome. I'm saying spreading nonsense about Hillary and encouraging unrealistic dissatisfaction among Democrats isn't helpful. Unless your goal is to help get Trump re-elected.

Let's get real for a minute...

The idea that a lot of potential Democratic voters(never mind the six or seven folks that still actually post in this thread...) will wind up more dissatisfied because of something someone brought up in a thread that is probably of very little interest to John/Jane Public?

That's gotta be an even bigger conspiracy theory than that Bill/HRC are in Biden's ear, no?

[numberthirty]

Past that pretty obvious bit?

I've just have a pretty hard time with the idea that Dems getting the "Basics 101..." stuff right starting yesterday is not the only real issue.

The other stuff you brought up?

It is a complete non-issue if Dems can figure out how to overrun first base on a bunt.

[numberthirty]

As for undercutting public opinion of Dems?

No one needs to do that when this sort of nonsense is coming down the pike...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59168626

Trump-Russia Steele dossier analyst charged with lying to FBI

A Russian analyst who worked on a dossier that made unsubstantiated claims linking Donald Trump to the Kremlin has been arrested in the US.

The Department of Justice charged Igor Danchenko, 43, with lying to the FBI.

According to the federal indictment, a US-based public relations executive "who was a long-time participant in Democratic Party politics" was "a contributor of information" to the dossier.

Mr Danchenko, it is alleged, lied to agents when he said he had never communicated with this unnamed PR executive about the dossier allegations.

A statement released by the US Department of Justice says Mr Danchenko was charged with making false statements to the FBI five times in 2017, "regarding the sources of certain information that he provided to a UK investigative firm".

[numberthirty]

While it is just a small step in the right direction, this is worth making note of...

https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-poli...ions/11197176/

5 drug convictions tied to corrupt ex-CPD Sgt. Ronald Watts vacated

[Xheight]

Republicans or Democrats, who is more likely to have their strings pulled? I'd argue Republicans, considering how Trump stirred up a mob to attack the Capitol, and how some of the Republicans in Congress that day, first condemned the attack, then went down to Florida only to come back singing a new tune.

It doesn't have to be a conspiracy to point out that influence and money directs candidates. https://jacobinmag.com/2021/03/democ...-2020-election

When people talk about the DNC it is a number of past heavy hitters like Obama and the donor class that attends his parties where people like Anita Dunn have moved in and out of this Biden WH.

[AnakinFlair]

Not sure if this was posted yet:

House passes $555 billion infrastructure bill, sends legislation to Biden's desk

Something to note here is that this became a bipartisan bill- 13 Republicans voted for this, and were instrumental in getting it passed. 6 Democrats voted against it- progressives who only wanted this passed if it was linked to the Reconciliation bill.

Can I just say how sick I am of the Progressives? The Democrats could have had this bill passed weeks ago, before the elections, which might have given the Democrats the bump they needed to win more last Tuesday. Instead, they've been every bit as big an obstruction as Sinema and Manchin (I'm sick of them, too).