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

[Gray Lensman]

I must admit I found that ruling to have been a surprise, given the right leaning bent of SCOTUS. Also on the docket for the Supremes: the matter of Trump being made to reveal his tax returns. I suspect he'll win that battle.

I'd also expect a very narrow ruling on this one - one that protects Trump in this instance only and can't be seized upon by later presidents. The reactionary three will happily sign on to that one - can't have a ruling like that also protect a Democrat down the line.

[worstblogever]

Watching Matt Gaetz get owned is beautiful.

https://twitter.com/mayaharris_/stat...95754095296514

Cedric Richmond just won re-election.

[Tendrin]

Cedric Richmond just won re-election.

"Was that a nerve?"

Love him.

[PaulBullion]

Trump reportedly tried to rewrite his father's will, but his dad thwarted the effort, saying it 'doesn't pass the smell test'



What to Know About Donald Trump's Niece Mary, Who Fought Him in Court & Is Writing a Tell-All







Mary Trump: Why has president's niece penned damning memoir?



Some background.

Doesn't quite sound like the greedy gold digger some people make her out to be.

Projection is a powerful drug.

[Tendrin]

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/polic...b699cea53196b4

Around the time news broke on Monday afternoon that the New York City Police Department would disband plainclothes anti-crime units that had been tied to several high-profile police shootings, someone calling themselves “ltdad613” started a thread on Thee Rant, a police message board that purports to host current and former NYPD employees. “I wouldn’t want to be a [Commanding Officer] for the next few compstats,” ltdad613 wrote. “This is right from [New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio]. I feel for anybody still on the job.”
Elsewhere, the posts on Thee Rant were much darker. In one Monday thread, “dominop” wrote that “A Firing squad would be a good cure for ANTIFA!!!” Other users chimed in to say snipers or napalm might be more fitting.
Thee Rant is just one node in a wider web of right-wing police media. On similar message boards, in Facebook groups and on news sites such as Law Enforcement Today — a sort of Breitbart-like outlet written by and for police — there is a fervent narrative that police are under nonstop siege, and that antifa in particular is a consta

I've seen the Policeone forums. This tracks.
.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

I'd also expect a very narrow ruling on this one - one that protects Trump in this instance only and can't be seized upon by later presidents. The reactionary three will happily sign on to that one - can't have a ruling like that also protect a Democrat down the line.

Yeah, perish forbid a precedent be set that allows a Democratic president to get away with all the **** Trump had done.

[InformationGeek]

This so sounds like middle school/high school drama BS.

Do you get the impression that the Supreme Court doesn’t like me?

[worstblogever]

It was on this date in 2015 that "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" profiled of of the former candidate for U.S. House of Representatives from North Carolina, Ilario Pantano, who became a right wing cult hero by, y’know, being accused of war crimes and arrested and put on trial for murdering two detained Iraqi citizens and displaying their corpses with a banner that said, “No better friend, no worse enemy” while serving in Operation: Iraqi Freedom. After a military trial where even several soldiers in his unit testified against him, media pundits like Michael Savage and U.S. House Rep. Walter Jones fought to have him cleared of all charges, and he was. But the GOP were not content to have a potential war criminal cleared of all charges and thought someone accused of murder overseas also made a great candidate for U.S. Congress, and ran Pantano as a Tea Party candidate in 2010, and he appeared along the campaign trail promising to fight against a “victory mosque” at 9-11’s Ground Zero, and making appearances with Pamela Geller, and other members of anti-Islamic hate groups. He currently has been appointed as the Assistant Secretary to the North Carolina Veteran’s Affairs Commission by Gov. Pat McCrory, but stepped down in May of 2016. It seems his time in the limelight is over.

In 2016, 2017, and 2018, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” presented its original profile of the current U.S. House Representative from Pennsylvania’s 9th Congressional District, Bill Shuster, who is a political legacy. Bill was first elected to serve Pennsylvania’s 9th way back in the 2000 elections after his father, fourteen term Congressman Bud Shuster, retired. Bud, a Chairman of the House Transportation Committee, was forced into retirement by multiple ethics investigations that he was accepting gifts from lobbyists, and using a former aide turned lobbyist, Ann Eddard, to speak on his behalf, actually trying to hide in the backseat of Eddard’s car while 60 minutes tried to get him to comment on the arrangement. Like father, like son, apparently. Because Bill Shuster has pushed the boundaries of what is acceptable behavior as the head of the House Transportation Committee, admitting in April of 2015 that he has been dating a lobbyist for Airlines for America. But before they announced it publicly, you see, they finalized Bill’s divorce from his wife of twenty years, and then signed documents to assure that his new squeeze wouldn’t lobby Bill directly (how romantic). Now, his gal pal would only lobby the entire rest of the committee that he runs and leave him be. See? Totally no influence there, right? I mean, other than the fact that Shuster keeps hiring people from Airlines for America to positions in his office and to be staff directors for the Transportation Committee in a way that sounds more like arranged marriages on Game of Thrones than part of a democracy. Because we are now in an era where our Congressmen can LITERALLY be in bed with lobbyists. Bill Shuster is also a climate change denier, insisting that there’s still “debate” on the subject, in spite of 98% of scientists saying the data is conclusive. And in 2009, he posted his own evidence that it didn’t exist at all… the weather forecast for Copenhagen… in December. And there was snow. So obviously it can’t be getting hotter if a balmy place like Denmark was seeing snow! In 2013, he introduced legislation to make any new rules enforced by the Environmental Protection Agency first require Congressional approval because he felt the organization was “running rampant”. (It’s not hard to imagine what an EPA being hamstrung by GOP obstructionism and a resentment of science would be faced with.) But perhaps the worst kind of denialism you’ll see from Bill Shuster is his efforts to petition his fellow members of Congress to not recognize the Armenian genocide of 1915, where over a million Armenians were killed, saying, “the events of 1915…did not constitute genocide because over two million Ottoman Kurds, Arabs, and Muslims…also suffered in this conflict.” Shuster told his colleagues that adopting the resolution to recognize something that clearly happened would be “cataclysmic”, and fearing what our Mid-East ally Turkey might think if they were forced to acknowledge a dark chapter of their own history, a century later. As far as the rest of Shuster’s voting record goes, he was around to vote for the Iraq War Resolution, and in 2006, was a co-sponsor of a bill that attempted to create a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage as well as to support the "Abortion Pain Bill", which would create an unconstitutional ban on abortion at 20 weeks. Bill Shuster voted in 2007 against ENDA, allowing the continued discrimination of LGBT citizens based on their sexual identity in the workplace. Through the early part of the Obama administration, he was quite the obstructionist, voting against the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, against the Hate Crimes Expansion, against Dodd-Bill Wall Street Reform, against stricter regulations on offshore drilling after the Deepwater Horizon spill, against the DREAM Act, against the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", and against the Zadroga Bill, to provide healthcare to the First Responders from 9/11, after many inhaled toxic dust and chemicals looking through the rubble for survivors after the tragedy. Since Republicans took control of the house, he voted for both attempts to defund Planned Parenthood, the great majority of attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, voted against raising the Debt Ceiling limit (which would have collapsed the global economy, and led to the United States having its credit rating reduced for the first time in its history), and also voted for the 2013 Government Shutdown. Shuster voted against funding the Department of Homeland Security in 2015, and was a co-sponsor of the American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act, an attempt to ban Syrian refugees from being resettled in the United States. Rep. Shuster returned to Washington in 2017 to start his ninth term in office (the only challenger he faced in 2016 was a Tea Party candidate who lost to him in the primary, but then re-entered the race as a “Democrat” to challenge him in the general election), and has been all over every Republican initiative in the new session, including flat-out lying about what a repeal of the Affordable Care Act would do to people with pre-existing conditions: He also added, at a later time, the brazenly false statement that Obamacare covered "24 million people fewer than it was supposed to, and the projected price tag doubled to $2 million". Fact-checkers were all over him on this, and thankfully, and his constituents were highly suspicious of his claims. Not that those voters would get a chance to confront him about it, because Shuster dodged all of his town halls for two whole years. Just prior to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s ruling where judges threw out the gerrymander engineered by the Pennsylvania GOP, Bill Shuster saw the writing on the wall and decided to hit the “EJECT” button and abandon Congress, failing in his promise to pass a new nationwide infrastructure bill before he left office.

One this date in 2019, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profiled Jeff Hoover, the former Republican Speaker of the House in the Kentucky House of Representatives, who served as a state legislator for District 83 from 1997-2018. Hoover’s two decades were marked by feverish support of a hyper-conservative agenda of anti-choice, pro-gun legislation he supported and that he’d even vote against minimum wage increases during our country’s greatest period of income inequality in a century. While we could analyze all that, it’s much more relevant to say that Jeff Hoover submitted his resignation in January of 2018 after it was revealed he didn’t just sexually harass women at the state capitol, but he would settle lawsuits from those incidents with taxpayer dollars. On a nearly daily basis, the 21 year-old staffer was sexually assaulted nearly daily by the 58-year-old Hoover, sometimes under the table in meetings at the capitol. And his obsession with her was terrifying, as reports were that he allegedly would scream at her for just talking to other men. Hoover had the nerve to finish out his final term so he could collect a government pension that he would have lost if he resigned from office entirely. We’ll just add him to the list of scumbags exposed by the MeToo Movement, and leave him with his own tainted legacy. As such, we will retire his profile at this time and take a look at another wacky Republican today instead. (Current crazy/stupid scoreboard, is now 880-45, since this was established in July 2014.)

[worstblogever]

C. Wesley Morgan

Welcome to what is the 880th original profile here at “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day”, where we’ll be discussing C. Wesley Morgan, who owns four liquor stores, and who was a one-term member of the Kentucky House of Representatives from 2017-2018. In 2020, he aimed much higher, as he was a candidate for U.S. Senate in Kentucky, hoping people hated Mitch McConnell

enough that he might upset him in the GOP Primary for the seat. Morgan managed to get caught up in controversy in 2017, in his first term in office, when it was discovered he bought a house boat thirteen years earlier in 2004 and paid not a dime of property taxes on it. Other than that, he supported a ban on abortion at only 11 weeks, and a bill that would have classified any attack on a first responder as a “hate crime”, because he was apparently into “Blue Lives Matter”.

Now, while in theory, anyone trying to beat Mitch McConnell, we want to root for instinctively, even if they are a lesser tax cheat and have a voting record like Morgan’s. But then again, repeatedly on social media, C. Wesley Morgan came out in defense of Qanon conspiracy theorists, both on Twitter, and Facebook, including posting the hashtag, “WWG1WGA”, and repeatedly shared links to Qanon videos.

So, while after losing to Mitch McConnell, C. Wesley Morgan offered to assist his Democratic opponent, we’re going to say that given his kooky background, his endorsement in the race would probably not be in their best interests.

He may now shuffle off and continue trying to grow a mustache unsuccessfully.

[Malvolio]

This so sounds like middle school/high school drama BS.

To paraphrase Van Halen: "Whoa, whoa, whoa, Donnie's cryin'!"

[worstblogever]

This so sounds like middle school/high school drama BS.

[Gray Lensman]

This so sounds like middle school/high school drama BS.

What the Yellow Snowflake can't wrap his head around is that Roberts is a stickler for what he sees as proper procedure. One of those points is that things need to be done in a certain order - First, find a justification for doing something, then do it. The tendency of Our Mussoliniest President to announce the order, and only then start looking for a pretext to do it rankles Roberts to no end.

[Gray Lensman]

To paraphrase Van Halen: "Whoa, whoa, whoa, Donnie's cryin'!"

I prefer the Billy Idol take.

"Cry you fat orange bitch! Cry more! More! More!"

[WestPhillyPunisher]

This so sounds like middle school/high school drama BS.

Someone call the wahhhbulance! Can you imagine the unholy fit Spongedon Whinepants will have if SCOTUS rules that his tax returns can be seen?

[WestPhillyPunisher]

To paraphrase Van Halen: "Whoa, whoa, whoa, Donnie's cryin'!"

I'm leaning towards Smokey Robinson: "Tears of a clown!"