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

[Tendrin]

It's complex.

The courts are one of the three branches of the government, in addition to the legislature (the House & Senate) and the executive branch.

There's an argument that congress has allowed the President to become too powerful, when these are supposed to be equal branches, with the legislature passing laws, the executive enforcing laws and the courts interpreting laws. Right now, we have a system where Congress seems to happy to give the President the credit and the blame.

On the power of the courts, I do think a lot of the legal discussions are disappointing because it just seems to be pretext for people's preferred policies. There isn't always a sense of someone's underlying legal principles, or when they would be okay with the court making decisions they wouldn't make as legislators.



That's not how the decision goes.

Schools that have the Biden administration's preferred trans policies will still receive school lunch funds.

You might want to contemplate what happens if the funding to the program is blocked over this senator's objection.

[Malvolio]

One persons vote vs several peoples votes isn't a fair trade.

Yeah. One of him vs. a dozen of us. Doesn't seem like a fair wager whatever the stakes are.

[Gray Lensman]

Yeah. One of him vs. a dozen of us. Doesn't seem like a fair wager whatever the stakes are.

It's even worse than that. Mets lives in NY, one of the most consistent voting states in the country, and he knows full well that many of the rest of us live in swing states.

He's wagering nothing on his side.

[Catlady in training]

People should vote for who they believe is the best for the country and the office of president. I dont agree with who people vote for all the time but they are voting for who they think is best. Too many people died to make this a right for every citizen. Too many people are fighting to keep it a right for every citizen. It should never be used as a punishment for an internet wager. Shame on you.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, as well as 2021, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” published profiles of U.S. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who we noted that during his military service, had to be court-martialed in 2004 because he went over the heads of his superiors and wrote an opinion editorial to the New York Times calling for the arrest of three of its reporters for reporting things happening during the War on Terror that he didn't particularly like. This demand to deny the freedom of the press by ignoring those higher up in the chain of command apparently taught Tom Cotton nothing, as in 2015, he became the leader of the #47Traitors, which were himself and 46 Republican Senators who tried to sabotage ongoing negotiations between the State Department and Iranian diplomats to create a nuclear treaty by writing a letter to the leaders of Iran that claimed they would just ignore the treaty after the next president was elected (which they actually can't do). Hundreds of thousands of people signed online petitions to see Sen. Cotton brought up on charges for violating the Logan Act, and he still didn't back down, comparing the Obama administration's effort to Neville Chamberlain appeasing Nazi Germany and saying that Secretary of State John Kerry “acted like Pontius Pilate”. This is but the tip of the iceberg, as Tom Cotton is a dumbass in oh so many ways, including his belief that Saddam Hussein and Iraq had a role in planning 9/11 (he said as much in an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN back in January of 2013, despite that idea being debunked by investigators a decade earlier), calling people on food stamps "addicts" who are "abusing taxpayer dollars", tried scaring people away from signing up for the Affordable Care Act because "Russian mobsters will steal your identity", and has no plans to do anything about the United States’ mass incarceration problem, criticizing efforts to reform our criminal justice system in a speech before the Hudson Institute where he said "If anything, we're under-incarcerating." Oh, and after the mass shooting in Orlando, Democrats filibustered the Senate for a vote to keep individuals on the "no fly list" for being a known terrorist from being able to buy firearms and carry out mass shootings, but again, Sen. Cotton votes against the common sense measure, that nine out of ten Americans support. In July of, 2016, Tom Cotton spoke at a panel hosted by Politico at the 2016 Republican National Convention, and gave the alarming analysis that the United States can just intervene in Syria, and should any Russian jets intervene on behalf of their allies in the Assad regime, to just shoot them down, too, because of the AUMFs signed way back in 2001 and 2002 that were meant to fight the war on terror and hunt for Osama bin Laden would also apply to this situation. Were we not clear this guy’s a war hungry nut?

On February 22nd, 2017, Cotton hosted his first town hall since the election of Donald Trump, and seemed rather surprised at how many extremely pissed off people showed up, and that they began chanting “DO YOUR JOB!” at him. Cotton was humiliated after being dressed down by an 7 year old speaker who seemed distressed that Cotton would support funding for Trump’s $20-30 billion dollar border wall, but balk at only millions of dollars allocated to fund PBS. At one point, he sarcastically asked how many people had actually been positively affected by the Affordable Care Act to stand up and after hundreds of people in the room stood, dismissed them out of hand. That became harder, of course, when a 25 year old woman with a genetic disorder, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, who arrived in a wheelchair pointed out that even if Planned Parenthood funding provided to the Affordable Care Act was repealed that funds her regular cancer screenings, without hyperbole, that she would die. Cotton just assured her she’d be fine, and was booed, because no one was buying that bulls***. The positive side effect, though? Donations towards the woman’s healthcare spiked after the exchange, so at least someone there not named Tom Cotton had a heart. Because Cotton seemed to invest stock into the theory that the anger he faced was actually coming from paid protesters sent by anonymous left wing donors (a conspiracy theory peddled by Donald Trump), when he told the crowd, “I don’t care if anybody here is paid or not.”

Two months later on April 17th, 2017, Cotton hosted another town hall and sent the crowd into a rage after failing to explain why he wouldn’t use his powers as a Senator to just use the evidence that was already known and subpoena Donald Trump’s tax returns, since he broke his promise to release them to the public, provoking them to begin chanting, “LOCK HIM UP!” at him. Criticism is apparently something Senator Cotton cannot process, because he’s taken to actually sending “cease and desist” letters to constituents who dare to call his office in Washington, D.C. to complain. No, we’re not exaggerating, he’s this petty.

Sen. Cotton, unlike more cautious Republicans, has tethered himself to the legacy of Donald Trump, arguably more than any other sitting member of the Senate, and hasn’t hesitated to defend him whenever an opportunity presents itself. Literally the day after the 2016 election, Sen. Cotton showed his eager excitement that the United States would, under Donald Trump, return to the practice of waterboarding. Even though the International Red Cross officially designated the practice as torture in 2014, and therefore it would be a violation of the Geneva Convention. But hey, so what about human rights abuses, right? Hell, Cotton’s drinking the Kool-Aid so hard he’s even on board with Trump’s plan to crack down not just on illegal immigration, but LEGAL immigration. More importantly, Sen. Cotton has been one of the Trump administration’s best obfuscators during the Trump Russia investigation, going on cable news to try and somehow lay blame for it on Ambassador Susan Rice as “the Typhoid Mary of the Obama administration”, because of her supposed role in “unmasking” during the investigation (don’t try to think about it because it makes no sense). During the testimony of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who was to serve as a witness regarding the firing of FBI Director James Comey for investigating the Trump/Russia connection, Sen. Cotton seemed to forgot how urgent the matter is regarding whether or not the current administration may be trying to block their involvement in potential treason, and begin to just playfully ask Sessions if he was a fan of the Jason Bourne movies or James Bond movies.

It wasn’t enough that Tom Cotton voted to put accused rapist Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, it wasn’t that he was grinning like an idiot after doing so, but after the fight was supposedly over, in October of 2018, Cotton began to posit conspiracy theories about the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford, and who it was that revealed her credible accusations of Brett Kavanaugh being an attempted rapist, at first, blaming Diane Feinstein, and then only about a week later, falsely claiming Chuck Schumer orchestrated the whole thing to smear Kavanaugh. (SPOILER ALERT: Like all conservative conspiracy theories, it was utter bulls***.)

[worstblogever]

Cotton was so far up Donald Trump’s *** during his administration that he actually tried lying to cover for him and claim that Trump never referred to Haiti and a large swath of African nations as “s***hole countries” during a discussion on immigration, contradicting even his fellow Republican Lindsey Graham on the matter.

When farmers in the rural Mid-West began to criticize Trump for is unnecessary trade war making it impossible for them to do business, he scoffed at their suffering, and said “pretty minimal compared to the sacrifices that our soldiers make overseas,” because of course this heartless motherf***er will use our troops as a political prop whenever it’s convenient and the situations are as much apples and oranges as possible. In August of 2019, the entire world laughed at Trump after he was making noise online about trying to buy Greenland. And as stupid as that was, Cotton is enough of a lemming to support even an idea that dumb from of the syphilitic madman in the Oval Office.

In February of 2020, Tom Cotton went on Fox News to spread the frequently debunked conspiracy theory that the Chinese government created Covid-19 in a lab and released it upon the globe, because of course he’s bats*** enough to do that. He continued ranting about it for two months that followed, impotently saying, “China will pay for this”, and trying to use Covid-19 as an excuse to ban all Chinese students studying abroad from doing so further in the United States.

Y’know, rational, totally not fascist, not fearmongering rhetoric.

Just in the past 18 months, some of the moments when Tom Cotton flexed to the world how much of an ***hole he really is:

• February 5th, 2020: Tom Cotton votes against the first impeachment of Donald Trump, in spite of the mountain of evidence showing that he solicited foreign assistance in the 2020 elections.
• February 25th, 2020: Cotton votes for the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, an insane piece of anti-choice legislation that would ask abortion providers to try to admit aborted fetuses to a hospital if they were “alive” after the procedure, which is medically impossible given the age that abortions can be performed at.
• June 3rd, 2020: As protests against police violence started after the death of George Floyd, Tom Cotton took the opportunity to write an op-ed in the New York Times filled with grotesque authoritarian ideology, including calling for the U.S. military to be deployed against American citizens, and all sorts of suggestions that aren’t just out of third-world dictatorships, but were an outright advocacy for fascism.
• July 27th, 2020: Sen. Cotton is interviewed by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and opines that slavery was “a necessary evil upon which our nation was built.”
• September 20th, 2020: In a Fox News interview, Chris Wallace throws Tom Cotton’s own words regarding Supreme Court Justices being voted on in an election year back in his face after he tries to justify voting on a replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
• October 25th, 2020: Sen. Cotton votes for the wildly unqualified Amy Coney Barret to be confirmed to the Supreme Court.
• January 23rd, 2021: A reporter at Salon magazine notes that Cotton has repeatedly touted his military experience as an Army Ranger, but by the military’s own standards, Cotton only attended Ranger School and never served in the unit, therefore, he is not a Ranger. When asked to comment on the article, his Congressional office responds by insulting the reporter.
• February 13th, 2021: Sen. Cotton votes against the second impeachment of Donald Trump, because accountability for inciting a violent coup attempt is somehow anathema to the majority of the Republican Party.
• March 6th, 2021: Cotton votes against the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, because he can’t be bothered to care if people need financial assistance during a pandemic.
• April 14th, 2021: Sen. Cotton is one of 6 Republican senators who vote against the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act.
• April 23rd, 2021: Tom Cotton argues in Congress against making Washington, D.C. a state by claiming it doesn’t deserve it and Wyoming does even though the latter has a fraction of the population because it has “three times the number of workers in mining, logging, construction, and 10 times the number of workers in manufacturing.”
• May 28th, 2021: Cotton votes against creating an independent commission to investigate the attack on the U.S. Capitol, because he knows members of his own caucus are up to their eyeballs in seditious activities, and he’ll cover for Donald Trump’s coup crew any time.
• June 11th, 2021: In a meeting of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Cotton asks the first African-American Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin if he thinks the United States Military is “a fundamentally racist organization” and begins complaining about a “woke ideology” in the military and “critical race concepts” to Austin before insinuating that racism in the American military didn’t take place prior to a few months earlier when President Biden took office.
• March 30th, 2022: Cotton votes against putting the extremely qualified nominee, Judge Kentanji Brown-Jackson, onto the Supreme Court.

Sadly, Tom Cotton was re-elected to the Seante in 2020 without facing a Democratic challenger, and taking 66.5% of the vote against Ricky Harrington, his Libertarian opponent. He is currently being hotshotted as a potential 2024 presidential pick for the GOP to put a racist fascist back into the White House, should Donald Trump end up in prison on the myriad of criminal investigations into himself and his businesses.

[Kirby101]

Remember Mets' bargain for Dems to agree on a total ban on abortion in return for a little movement on Climate Change?

And you notice we are not discussing the Rights the Court just stripped.

[Tendrin]

Remember Mets' bargain for Dems to agree on a total ban on abortion in return for a little movement on Climate Change?

And you notice we are not discussing the Rights the Court just stripped.

Heck, the supreme court just ruled that it's okay to deny dialysis for kidney failure patients.

June 21 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected dialysis provider DaVita Inc's (DVA.N) claims that an Ohio hospital's employee health plan discriminates against patients with end-stage kidney disease by reimbursing them at low rates in hopes they would switch to Medicare.

In a 7-2 decision authored by conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the court ruled that Marietta Memorial Hospital's employee health plan did not violate federal law by limiting benefits for outpatient dialysis because it did so without regard to whether patients had end-stage renal disease. A lower court had ruled in favor of Denver-based DaVita.

This ruling is insane. This ruling is insane because of *just who gets dialysis*.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-...ge-2022-06-21/

DaVita's lawyers had said a ruling against the company could open the door to other private health plans adopting terms to limit coverage for expensive dialysis treatments, forcing patients with end-stage renal disease to switch to Medicare.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Just got an alert that SCOTUS overturned Roe v. Wade. It’s not going to stop there, gay marriage is almost certain to be next in the crosshairs for this court. But hey, her emails.

[Username taken]

Wow, this is the first time in centuries the Supreme Court has totally stripped a right away.

The US is really under the tyranny of a minority.

[Kirby101]

There will be a total ban on abortions in at least half the States soon. But hey America, keep voting in Christo-fascist Republicans.

Forget about "life of the mother" bullshit, there will be no facilities to perform abortions in those States that only allow that. A lot of women are going to die because of this Court.

[Panfoot]

Just got an alert that SCOTUS overturned Roe v. Wade. It’s not going to stop there, gay marriage is almost certain to be next in the crosshairs for this court. But hey, her emails.

Thomas specifically calls for reconsidering Griswald (contraception), Laurence (same sex relationships), and Obergefell (same sex marriage). I'll put it as nicely as I can: I hope those fuckers croak.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

There will be a total ban on abortions in at least half the States soon. But hey America, keep voting in Christo-fascist Republicans.

Forget about "life of the mother" bullshit, there will be no facilities to perform abortions in those States that only allow that. A lot of women are going to die because of this Court.

Sad but true. From coast to coast, back alley butchers are wearing **** eating grins while sharpening their knives, because they’ll soon be back in business.

[Tendrin]

Thomas specifically calls for reconsidering Griswald (contraception), Laurence (same sex relationships), and Obergefell (same sex marriage). I'll put it as nicely as I can: I hope those fuckers croak.

But Panfoot, Mets assures us this won't happen! (It will totally happen if they're not stopped.)

There needs to be an immense blowback on the GOP for this.

[Username taken]

Thomas specifically calls for reconsidering Griswald (contraception), Laurence (same sex relationships), and Obergefell (same sex marriage). I'll put it as nicely as I can: I hope those fuckers croak.

This court will definitely throw gay marriage back to the states.

And a good chunk of states had laws that banned gay marriage.

Basically, we are back to square one.