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

[Tendrin]

I'm sure anti-vaxxers who get sick at the next conservative superspreader event will claim they contracted the Black Plague. Lord, what fools right wingers are.

Don't be silly. Modern conservatives are historically illiterate enough to only think 'the black plague' refers to 'black on black crime' or abortion :P

[Zauriel]

You are welcome, Jbento, Babyblob. I'm glad you liked the list I showed

3rd party presidential candidates have been spoilers who normally makes thing worse since 1912 - the year Teddy Roosevelt ruined things for progressives and got us stuck with Woodrow Wilson (who you can make a case for being the single worst president EVER). In other elections the math isn't set up to screw things by voting for a 3rd party - I encourage it on those levels, but the rules of a presidential election are set up to punish that sort of thing. Clinton being elected might be the exception that proves the rule - I didn't like him at the time, (being a registered Republican as a reaction to Emperor Cuomo the First) but my fears weren't realized, and I was open-minded enough to realize that fact.

I agree Woodrow was a bad president. He maintained segregation in the federal workplace. But was Taft better than Wilson? When Teddy Roosevelt exited the office, he left it to his hand-picked successor Taft on the assumption that Taft would follow Teddy's progressive policies. But Teddy soon realized that Taft strayed away from his progressive policy and became very upset, so that is why he ran for presidency again.
Taft was not very bad but he did appoint a Southern democrat named Edward Douglass White as Chief Justice. He sided with the Supreme Court majority in Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld the legality of state segregation to provide "separate but equal" public facilities in the United States, despite protections of the Fourteenth Amendment to equal protection of the laws. Plessy is widely regarded as one of the worst decisions in U.S. Supreme Court history.

[Gray Lensman]

You are welcome, Jbento, Babyblob. I'm glad you liked the list I showed


I agree Woodrow was a bad president. He maintained segregation in the federal workplace. But was Taft better than Wilson? When Teddy Roosevelt exited the office, he left it to his hand-picked successor Taft on the assumption that Taft would follow Teddy's progressive policies. But Teddy soon realized that Taft strayed away from his progressive policy and became very upset, so that is why he ran for presidency again.
Taft was not very bad but he did appoint a Southern democrat named Edward Douglass White as Chief Justice. He sided with the Supreme Court majority in Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld the legality of state segregation to provide "separate but equal" public facilities in the United States, despite protections of the Fourteenth Amendment to equal protection of the laws. Plessy is widely regarded as one of the worst decisions in U.S. Supreme Court history.

Wilson didn't maintain segregation, he recreated it. He inherited an integrated federal government and left a segregated one.

That line about "make the world safe for democracy" you might remember hearing, and seeing ignored when said democracy did stuff the US didn't like? That started under Wilson. Check out the Banana Wars.

His legitimizing of the KKK and their beliefs led to a series of so called race riots, but since almost all the dead were on one side, they are better called race massacres.

After WW1 his people were insisting on self determination, until some American educated guy from French Indochina had the temerity to ask of it applied to people like him (since this is Wilson, it pretty much was limited to Whites Only). Said guy decides that maybe that Lenin person is worth listening to instead. His name? Well, he changed it to Ho Chi Minh somewhere along the way.

No president did more long term damage than Woodrow Wilson, except perhaps Andrew Johnson. Even Buchanan merely was unable to answer the task of a fracturing country, but that was a March we were on long before him. Wilson created new problems and derailed progress.

Taft wasn't as good a president as Teddy was, but he was still leagues ahead of Wilson.

[Tami]

U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn, wife are divorcing

U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn and his wife are divorcing, the North Carolina Republican announced in a statement Wednesday, citing irreconcilable differences.

Cawthorn, 26, who was elected to Congress last November, said that he and his wife Cristina “mutually decided to divorce.”

He shared the news of their marriage in an April tweet. Cawthorn said Wednesday that they were engaged before he was in Congress, that after he took office their lives changed, and that they tried “balancing the enormity of such a transition in life.”

That didn't last long

[PaulBullion]

U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn, wife are divorcing





That didn't last long

Didn't he miss all those votes to make sure he could satisfy her?

WHAT ELSE DID SHE WANT!

[Gray Lensman]

Didn't he miss all those votes to make sure he could satisfy her?

WHAT ELSE DID SHE WANT!

I was wondering if the differences were that she lived in reality and he did not.

[Mister Mets]

Duplicate.

[Mister Mets]

Wilson didn't maintain segregation, he recreated it. He inherited an integrated federal government and left a segregated one.

That line about "make the world safe for democracy" you might remember hearing, and seeing ignored when said democracy did stuff the US didn't like? That started under Wilson. Check out the Banana Wars.

His legitimizing of the KKK and their beliefs led to a series of so called race riots, but since almost all the dead were on one side, they are better called race massacres.

After WW1 his people were insisting on self determination, until some American educated guy from French Indochina had the temerity to ask of it applied to people like him (since this is Wilson, it pretty much was limited to Whites Only). Said guy decides that maybe that Lenin person is worth listening to instead. His name? Well, he changed it to Ho Chi Minh somewhere along the way.

No president did more long term damage than Woodrow Wilson, except perhaps Andrew Johnson. Even Buchanan merely was unable to answer the task of a fracturing country, but that was a March we were on long before him. Wilson created new problems and derailed progress.

Taft wasn't as good a president as Teddy was, but he was still leagues ahead of Wilson.

I agree with what you said, and will add some more.

He used the Sedition Act of 1918 to criminalize speech against World War One, and arrest a prominent critic, the Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs. Obviously, this is not as bad as an average administration in the Soviet Union, but it was still bad.

After his stroke, rather than do the right thing and resign so that his Vice President could take over, he let his second wife basically run the country.

The arguments for Wilson aren't that the bad things he did weren't that bad, but that he did some good stuff as well. I'm not as inclined to see things that way, but that would be the best defense, rather than suggesting Taft was worse.

A recent positive development has been the willingness of left-wing academics to be honest about the flaws of previous Democratic presidents. It likely helped that they now had Barack Obama to point to, as a relatively successful two-term progressive President free of personal scandal. That meant historians were more open to the flaws of Wilson, JFK and Bill Clinton.

[Tendrin]

I'd suggest that other social forces had more to do with that than partisan politics, though it presumably played a small role as well.

[Tami]

New: House Republican Tom Rice tells Politico he regrets objecting to Biden win on Jan. 6 — “In retrospect I should have voted to certify, because President Trump was responsible for the attack on the Capitol.”

Twitter Link

[Robotman]

U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn, wife are divorcing





That didn't last long

She just wasn’t as in to Hitler as he is. Irreconcilable differences.

[Tami]

US conservative parents push for book bans – and unintentionally make reading cool again

One of the books targeted by name was 33 Snowfish, an acclaimed 2003 novel concerning a trio of runaway teens and all sorts of sordid, Kids-ish behavior. The concerned parents of northern Virginia believed that heady themes of poverty, addiction and abuse have no place in the sanctums of learning, and therefore, the book needed to go.

When Paul Cymrot heard about the meeting, he tracked down as many copies of 33 Snowfish he could find. He soon discovered, ironically, that book was never really in the school library. 33 Snowfish is barely in print, and Cymrot tells me that it was an ebook version, lingering in some dusty corner of the school library servers, which sparked the initial animus.

The moral militancy immediately backfired, because Cymrot knows a good business opportunity when he sees one. He’s owned the Spotsylvania-area Riverby Books for 25 years, and possesses a shrewd nose for the ebbs and flows of the publishing market. One bookselling truth remains eternally undefeated, explains Cymrot. When a censorious zeitgeist swallows up a novel, a lot of people will want to buy it.

“It was not easy to find a box full of 33 Snowfish, but we did,” he continues. “We sold all that we bought, and we kept a couple as loaners because we wanted to make sure any students in the community could see what the fuss was about. There will always be some around.”

It’s now easier than ever to read 33 Snowfish in Spotsylvania county, subverting the rightwing siege on the supposed woke conspiracy infecting school libraries.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2018, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profiled Rich Hobson, a failed candidate in 2018 for the U.S. House of Representatives seat to represent Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District. Hobson finished a distant fourth in the GOP Primary for this seat with about only 7.5% of the vote, and well behind the incumbent and CSGOPOTD alumni Martha Roby. So what is it about Rich Hobson that makes him worthy of one of our profiles? Well, Hobson was Roy Moore’s campaign manager during his disastrous run for U.S. Senate in Alabama in the last part of 2017. And it isn’t just that he’s a die-hard Roy Moore supporter to this day, still standing by the racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, pedophilic theocrat… we just think back to Moore’s campaign and realize how he was extraordinarily bad at his job. Even when you take the details about how terrible Roy Moore is… what the hell was up with coming up with the gimmick of having him badly ride a horse to the polls like a drunken John Wayne movie villain on multiple occasions? We’ll not that Hobson’s campaign platform is almost identical to Moore’s pathlogically insane one, including his passion for the highly unconstitutional idea of putting Ten Commandments monuments in government buildings. Anyway, Hobson thought he would score points with GOP primary voters by giving away AR-15s at campaign events, because there aren’t enough of them floating around this country already, and also, he was dumb enough to campaign with his old pal, the accused pedophile himself. Because he remains that brilliant of a campaign strategist.


On this date in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2019, as well as in 2020, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day posted profiles of Montana State Senator Keith Regier, who has repeatedly tried to create laws criminalizing “attacks upon an unborn child” that are blatant attempts at overriding Roe v. Wade, and in defending those sorts of laws, has on more than one occasion compared pregnant women to cattle. His problems with the female gender don’t end there, as Regier attempted to re-write sumptuary laws in the state capitol to keep female legislators from showing too much knee.

Regier also once tried manufacturing outrage over “Obamaphones”, a right-wing myth that President Obama started giving out free phones to minorities that is based on an insane version of reality where the program of getting welfare recipients functioning phones established during the Reagan presidency is now a conspiracy being perpetrated by Obama. He has voted for laws to attempt to nullify federal firearm laws, as well as voted to drug test welfare recipients, as well.

In Keith Regier’s first term in the Montana State Senate he tried passing anti-abortion legislation in the form of a “fetal pain” bill, and sabotaged a bill aimed at curtailing revenge porn by inserting language that indicates it’s only a crime if a person “financially profits” from it, a new form of misogynist dickery from Keith. It also ignores the fact that the main motivating factor is right in the name of the crime “REVENGE porn”. Regier also began dabbling in Islamophobia, by pushing for a bill to attempt to create an unnecessary ban Sharia Law in Montana that could inadvertently affect how tribal law is conducted on many Native American reservations in the state in its poorly thought out language.

Regier won re-election in November with 55% of the vote, and we would like to point out that he made headlines in April of 2021, when during a debate on a bill about vaccine mandates, Regier promoted the conspiracy theory that the Covid-19 vaccine somehow contains “microscopic tracking chips” during debate on the floor of the Montana State Senate. The quote:

”It's still requiring an employee to put something into their bodies in order to be employed. That's crazy. What's next? I've read articles about putting a little chip in with the vaccine. There you got, right there — so what if that is federally approved and the employer requires that?”

Just… holy s***, what a kook.

The only good news we have about him as that Keith Regier will face term limits in 2024.

[AnakinFlair]

U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn, wife are divorcing

That didn't last long

Good to see his wife taking a stand.

[worstblogever]

Good to see his wife taking a stand.

And only a few weeks after Cawthorn referred to women as being "earthen vessels" for men to plant their seed in.

It's almost like she realized he views women as nothing but baby-making cookware.