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

[worstblogever]

I do love the jokes about Biden being senile etc. Of course the fact Trumpsters make this one after a man looked into an eclipse and bragged he saw an elephant on a dementia test like he passed the bar exam makes it funny. I mean your bar on discussing senile is kinda....low here while you defended the last guy.

The idea that we aren't clearly in better hands from the former guy just putting out deranged posts on Twitter from the toilet at 4 or 5 AM every day, and all day while getting "intelligence" from Fox News hosts...

Like... Biden's clearly an improvement. I know. That's a low, low bar... but the fact that Republicans actively want that back, and are denying that he lost an election by a substantial amount to put him back in power to "own the libs" and place us all in peril... that's reprehensible from those seditious twits.

[Mister Mets]

With specific care for the public good, I've noticed there is no reason to have faith in what version of reality dedicated Republicans present while they have ignored their descent into becoming a fascist, white nationalist party that have actively aided the spread of a pandemic for political reasons.

This being said, your argument is broken down simply as, "I refuse to acknowledge things that actually have improved in the past year, or acknowledge that they happened due to an improvement in leadership."

I clearly acknowledged that things have gotten better in the post in which I wrote "The improvement in the economy and the improvement for Covid deaths."

If you misinterpret posts that are right in front of you, I have difficulty taking you seriously on bolder claims.

Presumably we're able to agree that two reasons things have gotten better are the invention of the vaccines, and the mildness of the Omicron variant, and that neither of these is due to President Biden.

As for how much credit Biden should get, much of it depends on what he did to make a difference that the Trump administration would not. Otherwise he's the beneficiary of good timing. This is an administration that was unable to predict a high demand for Covid tests before and during the Christmas and New Years vacation, when it was pretty obvious that a lot of Americans would be travelling, and that Covid numbers would increase in the North (both due to the seasonal problem of people spending more time indoors, as well as the increased travel and disease transmission during the holiday.)

[CSTowle]

Not to say that we should give Biden credit for the invention or development of the vaccine, but if the implication would be Trump is to get any credit then the question would need to be asked, "what would a Biden (or a Sanders/Clinton/Warren/etc.) Administration have done in Trump's place?" Would they have pushed for the development of a vaccine and funded a similar program? I don't think there's much doubt that they would have. If anything I'd give credit to Trump for at least in this one instance doing the bare minimum expected, though I have no doubt someone got in his ear and told him it needed to be done before masks and vaccines became a no-go in Republican politics.

It's purely speculation, but I wouldn't be surprised that if the reverse were true (Biden was at the helm during Covid's appearance, and Trump was elected to replace him in 2020) Trump would be actively suppressing Covid protocols and making things more difficult in order to garner favor with his base. Then again, he does still mention the vaccine in a positive light and clearly gets the only boos he's likely to receive at his rallies because of it.

[Kirby101]

The vaccine was developed because of an Obama/Biden project. Trump had little to do with it.the Vaccine was almost done before Trump acknowledged COVID was here. And remember, he disbanded the pandemic task force. No question a Democratic Administration would have done better.

This is from 2010.

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-pers...ndemic-vaccine

[The Cool Thatguy]

The problem with giving Trump credit for the vaccine is that all he ever did was throw money at a situation. A situation everyone was already throwing money at to begin with.

Trump missed the opportunity to lock in PPE. His mismanagement of that alone forced states to compete against one another.

His stance on masks? On lock downs?

And when we finally had the vaccine, he had no plan whatsoever to get the shots in arms.

Trump doesn't get credit for doing one single thing right, when he got dozens of equally important things wrong. And the first vaccine wasn't developed under Operation Warp Speed, so screw 'em.

[The Cool Thatguy]

The vaccine was developed because of an Obama/Biden project. Trump had little to do with it.the Vaccine was almost done before Trump acknowledged COVID was here. And remember, he disbanded the pandemic task force. No question a Democratic Administration would have done better.

Any prior administration would have done better, because they would have seen this coming, and reacted accordingly.

Hell, Bush Jr. saw something like this coming during his term, and he wasn't facing an actual pandemic.

[Mister Mets]

Not to say that we should give Biden credit for the invention or development of the vaccine, but if the implication would be Trump is to get any credit then the question would need to be asked, "what would a Biden (or a Sanders/Clinton/Warren/etc.) Administration have done in Trump's place?" Would they have pushed for the development of a vaccine and funded a similar program? I don't think there's much doubt that they would have. If anything I'd give credit to Trump for at least in this one instance doing the bare minimum expected, though I have no doubt someone got in his ear and told him it needed to be done before masks and vaccines became a no-go in Republican politics.

It's purely speculation, but I wouldn't be surprised that if the reverse were true (Biden was at the helm during Covid's appearance, and Trump was elected to replace him in 2020) Trump would be actively suppressing Covid protocols and making things more difficult in order to garner favor with his base. Then again, he does still mention the vaccine in a positive light and clearly gets the only boos he's likely to receive at his rallies because of it.

Fair question.

Democrats tend to be more cautious when it comes to regulations, so it's certainly possible that the vaccine would not have been released as quickly under a Democratic administration, as it did require emergency exceptions.

NIH director Francis Collins gave the Trump administration credit for the speed with which the vaccine was developed.

https://www.axios.com/francis-collin...752de71e7.html

Edit- Politico has an extensive piece on the origins of Operation Warp Speed, along with early successes and struggles.

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/0...p-speed-459892

One thing that might have gone differently in a Democratic administration is that they would have likely worried more about optics for stuff like whether a key HHS ally benefitted financially from his participation. On this type of stuff, they would likely compromise on quality.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article...er-warns-delay

[Kirby101]

Operation Warp Speed was A total failure. Collins was being politically expedient.
It did not get vaccines into people's arms.
Democrats move quicker than Republicans when it comes to public safety.

[worstblogever]

Democrats move quicker than Republicans when it comes to public safety.

It starts from actually caring about it, and having empathy for people other than yourself, which the great majority of current elected Republicans are incapable of, ideologically.

That's precisely the crux of it.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2015, 2016, 2017, as well as 2018, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day”posted profiles of Mike Pompeo, the former U.S. House Representative for Kansas’ 4th District and a man who we noted at the time was first elected to office in the Tea Party Wave on the strength of the largest single campaign contribution from the Koch Brothers, at $80,000, and using racist dog-whistles (and in some instances, air raid sirens) against his Indian-American opponent who his campaign floated theories about on social media saying he was a secret Muslim or a "turban topper" while telling people to "Vote American". His Islamophobia continued at the capitol, where he declared all Muslim clerics "complicit" in terror attacks for not criticizing them vociferously Pompeo also has also been one of the loudest warmongers in the GOP the past few years, calling not just for boots on the ground against ISIS, but insisting the United States should start bombing Iran with tens of thousands of sorties to curtail their nuclear program instead of trying to negotiate a treaty to do so. Hell, he’s even gone on conservative talk radio and said he feels President Obama has an "kind of an affinity for, if not the violent beheading and crucifixions and slaying of Christians and all that", before beginning to speculate that Muslim Congressman Andre Carson could be part of an "Islamic fifth column" with "deep ties to the Muslim Brotherhood". Pompeo is far enough to the right on abortion that he didn’t just vote to defund Planned Parenthood, but he classified that vote as a move to “defund the selling of baby parts". He was also particularly paranoid about Benghazi, declaring on an episode of Meet the Press with Chuck Todd that "Benghazi was worse than Watergate", and later at the Benghazi hearings themselves, insinuating that the consulate in Benghazi was being used by Sec. of State Clinton to run guns illegally to Syria. Lastly, we will reiterate that Mike Pompeo often makes conservative arguments while claiming "history" backs up his statements, when he's completely talking out of his hind end, like the time he gave a lesson on gun control around the world by claiming the United Kingdom doesn't have their own Bill of Rights (they do, and it predates our own by a century), or the time he argued against gay adoption by saying that same-sex couples don't have the same ability to properly rear children that traditional couples do (statistics show that might be completely false). Mike Pompeo left Congress upon being given a position in Donald Trump’s “Cabinet of Horrors” as the head of the Central Intelligence Agency. Mind you, because Trump is a tragically f***ed up misanthrope, his administration has a revolving door for firings, resignations, and indictments. As such, you’ll see news stories about how Rex Tillerson wants to quit as Secretary of State and Pompeo is going to end up replacing him. Until folks within the White House start trying to get rich by writing tell-all books, we’ll never know how close those moments are to being true. This also applies to rumors that there are high-ranking people within the CIA withholding information from Trump (because he’s a moron and blurts out top secret information to whatever Russians he meets face-to-face). We do know that once the election was over, at some point he went from giving a thumbs-up to Wikileaks, to calling it a hostile intelligence service (maybe he should have checked to see all the colluding the president’s son did with them during the campaign. All we know is… Mike Pompeo is still a war hawk, and a moron, and is honestly lucky he didn’t go to jail after being implicated in Donald Trump’s attempted bribery of Ukraine.

On this date in 2019, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profiled former Illinois House of Representatives member John Cavaletto, who served Illinois’ District 107 from 2008-2018. Cavaletto came to our attention here back in 2016, when he decided to take his “smaller government/family values” ideals to quite the extreme by filing legislation that would ensure that any mother who did not put a father’s name on their child’s birth certificate, that the certificate would be denied, not issued, and the mother would be ineligible to get any government assistance to raise that child. Now, there are some definite examples of why a mother would omit a biological father’s name from a birth certificate, like in cases of rape. After national outcry, he dropped his bill without attempting to advance it. This is not, to say, that John Cavaletto’s legislative record showing disdain for women was limited to that one bill. For he also voted against ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment in Illinois, and voted against a law that would require businesses to pay for the birth control of employees on their insurance plans. On other issues, Cavaletto was becoming even more extreme as well, voting against an increase in the minimum wage during the greatest period of income inequality in our country in almost a century, and on LGBTQ issues, voting against a ban on gay conversion therapy on minors and voting against a bill to allow transgender citizens to change their gender on their birth certificates. On firearms, while Chicago is afflicted with one of the worst runs of gun violence in decades, Cavaletto has voted against age limits on assault weapon ownership, and against even simple ideas like a ban on bump stocks, or to put a 72 hour waiting limit on firearms purchases. Cavaletto opted to retire in 2018.

On this date in 2020, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profiled David Bates, a former member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives for four non-consecutive terms from 2008-2018. Bates’ signature issue was, by most accounts, the “sanctity of marriage” and denying gay people the ability to get legally married, sponsoring attempts to repeal legalized same sex marriages in New Hampshire. Although, it didn’t seem like Bates was content to stop there, because he was arguing against marriage equality on the grounds that being gay was “a preferential choice”, and therefore LGBTQ rights should not be treated as a protected civil right. As revolting of an opinion as that might be, it still is not the worst thing David Bates ever did during his tenure on the issue of marriage. Back in 2017, a New Hampshire Girl Scout named Cassie Levesque lobbied the state legislature to try and raise the minimum age that someone could be married in New Hampshire to 16 from a disturbingly low 13. And Bates, specifically, was the legislator who blocked the bill, because it was “from a minor doing a Girl Scout project, and he cited that the bill should be kept on the books because of “when there’s an unplanned pregnancy”.Because the best thing to do with a 13 year old girl who gets pregnant by accident is to force her into a marriage she isn’t ready for, either. Outside of having backwards-ass views from the 19th Century, Bates also supported Voter ID laws aimed at voter suppression, attempting to repeal the buffer zone around abortion clinics in the state, voting against both a ban on gay conversion therapy on minors, as well as voting against a bill to prevent discrimination based on gender identity, and finally a vote against repealing the death penalty in the state. David Bates was already annoying the mainstream GOP in New Hampshire by starting a knockoff “Freedom Caucus” similar to the one in Washington D.C. and the Texas state legislature in his final term, and perhaps with the disgust he created over the child marriage ban combined with the Democratic Blue Wave approaching in 2018, he opted to not run for re-election

On this date in 2021, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” first profiled Ben Gibson, a 2020 candidate for U.S. House of Representatives in Louisiana’s 4th Congressional District, who is yet the latest Republican we’re going to profile who campaigned for office while pushing the deranged Qanon Conspiracy Theory, tagging posts with the Qanon hashtag. Gibson also had a white nationalist bent, pushing Donald Trump’s “America First” policy while deriding both “radical Islam” and railing against China (while speaking not at all of Russia). So if our geopolitical foes were white, he forgot all about them, you see. He also bragged about his experience as a firefighter in Bossier City, although, for whatever reason (he’s a liar), the fire chief at that station said not only has Gibson never worked there, he hasn’t worked for Bossier City in any position, whatsoever. Gibson ended up finishing 4th in the November election, earning 6% of the vote, or about 10% of what the winner, Mike Johnson got. Only a few weeks after the 2020 election, Ben Gibson was arrested and charged with four counts of possession of child pornography, with the victims being under the age of 13. So the guy who is trying to spread the conspiracy theory that Democrats are running secret pedophile rings… was in possession of child pornography. As that makes him extremely unlikely to ever reach office, even after his legal troubles are over, we will retire his profile to cover another wacky Republican today instead. (Current crazy/stupid scoreboard, is now 1061-50, since this was established in July 2014.

[worstblogever]

Oley Larsen

Welcome to what is the 1061st original profile here at “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day”, where we’ll be discussing North Dakota State Senator Oley Larsen, who represents District 3 of that body and was first elected to that office back in… what else, the 2010 Tea Party Wave. You wouldn’t think that one Republican from North Dakota could do much to make himself notorious in the media nationally, but in 2019, Larsen did manage to make the news cycle for all the wrong reasons.

You see, a lot of Republicans reacted poorly to Democrats winning back the House of Representatives in the 2018 elections, and in particularly, panicked about the rise of “The Squad”, women of color in Washington to get a progressive agenda moving. One of those women is Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a Muslim refugee from Somalia… so Oley Larsen saw a conspiracy theory about her being raised in an Al Qaeda training camp and shared that with the world on Facebook. Now, if you’re not immediately aware that it’s bulls***, the photo in question was taken before Ilhan Omar was born, let alone old enough to be in the photo in question was taken in 1978. Larsen has never apologized for accusing a sitting member of Congress of being a member of a foreign terrorist organization, and he refused to resign as President Pro Tempore of the North Dakota State Senate. His fellow Republicans, of course, also did nothing to hold him accountable for his bigoted, Islamophobic accusation.

In just sexist implications, in April of 2021, on the floor of the State Senate, Larsen was rambling and telling an anecdote about his wife giving birth and trying to get to the hospital and referred to her water breaking and her leaving a “snail trail”. Which… that doesn’t mean what you think it does Oley. Or it does, and your wife is gonna be pissed off at you.

Anyway, Oley Larsen is also an extremist as a legislator, sponsoring bills to drug test welfare recipients, supporting a bill to place monuments of the Ten Commandments in all public school classrooms (pretty big violation of the separation of church and state), and has sponsored some of the harshest anti-choice legislation in the country, including a bill to change the definition of “human being” to include embryos and zygotes at any stage of development, thus making abortion murder.

He is currently trying to win back favor with his constituents by sponsoring legislation to limit mask mandates and allow Covid-19 to kill more and more of them. His idiot colleagues actually overturned the governor’s veto of this bill, because of course they did.

[CSTowle]

Fair question.

Democrats tend to be more cautious when it comes to regulations, so it's certainly possible that the vaccine would not have been released as quickly under a Democratic administration, as it did require emergency exceptions.

NIH director Francis Collins gave the Trump administration credit for the speed with which the vaccine was developed.

https://www.axios.com/francis-collin...752de71e7.html

Edit- Politico has an extensive piece on the origins of Operation Warp Speed, along with early successes and struggles.

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/0...p-speed-459892

One thing that might have gone differently in a Democratic administration is that they would have likely worried more about optics for stuff like whether a key HHS ally benefitted financially from his participation. On this type of stuff, they would likely compromise on quality.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article...er-warns-delay

I can't disagree, and would add I'm not sure we would have had the stimulus benefits under a Democratic administration because they would have wanted to avoid seeming like they were doing something "socialist" to stimulate the economy, even given the situation. Trump doesn't give a damn about norms or ideology and knew giving out money with his name on a check was good publicity. I remember one time he asked about businesses that rely on government loans, and if there wasn't some way the government could take a cut of the profits if they pony up the loans. Still warms my heart to think of the folks at places like the Heritage Foundation slapping their foreheads and waving "No, no, no Mr. President!" He doe'n't know.

[Kirby101]

The Stimulus was pushed by the Democrats, who controlled Congress. No reason not to be sure, it is what really happened. And Biden pushed for more stimulus. So again, no need to speculate when we see what happened.
Trump, worst....President...ever!

[4saken1]

I feel that if Trump had issued national stay at home orders and mask mandates that it would have helped to lower the curve and save lives as well. He would have lost a lot of support among conservatives and those issues would have been challenged, but I feel that a reasonable amount of people would have complied. Enough that it would have made a difference. I think these are things that a Democratic President probably would have done.

[Gray Lensman]

The Stimulus was pushed by the Democrats, who controlled Congress. No reason not to be sure, it is what really happened. And Biden pushed for more stimulus. So again, no need to speculate when we see what happened.
Trump, worst....President...ever!

Well, there is still Woodrow Wilson and Andrew Johnson for people who actively made things worse, and James Buchanan and Herbert Hoover for being unable to meet the challenges of the day. Depends on your criteria - Still, Trump is in the bottom 5, and the worst post WW2 (depending on how you see Dubya) without much of a question.

People who think he was anything other than awful are deluded.