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

[CaptainEurope]

I have to say it's telling how active and personal this thread gets when someone discusses Democrats the same way many of the regulars go after Republicans.

Let us know when that happens.

[skyvolt2000]

I have to say it's telling how active and personal this thread gets when someone discusses Democrats the same way many of the regulars go after Republicans.

Care to show those examples?

A Democrat would get ripped a new one for doing the same mess as Republicans have done.

Show us the Texas Democrat head hunting for "Woke" books instead of working on making sure the power grid in Texas stays up.

Guess what we got power outages in Texas in the districts of Ted Cruz and John Cornyn.

[hyped78]

Dang, go away for half a day.



In fairness Woody Allen almost certainly groomed a child and f##ked her as soon as she was legal (if not sooner).



Guess you're from Europe and perhaps not used to the everyday/everpresent racism we have here in America (though with mass migration it's getting there) but the "some of my best friends" or equivalent is not a line you want to lead wtih.

We're about a dozen pages from my quoting you, but if you did read my rather long entry on the reasons the Biden Administration appears to be doing poorly laid out in way too many short paragraphs and examples should I take it you agree with me and that he's dealing with an awful lot and it's probably too soon to tell? If not, which examples would you say I'm overplaying and why? I see many quotes from others, mostly those insulting you (and fair enough, nobody likes that) but I'm curious what your thoughts are on the state of things as they're dealing with them.

Sorry, what page was that on? Apologies but I can go back, read and comment.

On racism, in the UK there is a lot of it and not just against people of color. A lot of Brexit voters (but not all, of course) are racists or want to curb immigration etc. Might not be on the same scale as the US (not sure what "metric" we could use to compare that) but several european countries have different forms of racism, e.g. in Spain calling hispanics "sudacas".

[hyped78]

The problem here is the "radical left" is a fringe part of the Democratic Party, while the "radical right" IS the Republican Party. But "both sides!", sure.

I don't disagree with that. You do have some examples of the "radical left" on this thread though, even if they don't think that is the case

[kidfresh512]

Care to show those examples?

A Democrat would get ripped a new one for doing the same mess as Republicans have done.

Show us the Texas Democrat head hunting for "Woke" books instead of working on making sure the power grid in Texas stays up.

Guess what we got power outages in Texas in the districts of Ted Cruz and John Cornyn.

I was thinking about this as I watched the clip of Buttigieg get questioned by this idiot Nehls that I voted against.

Putting on this idiotic performance having his interns blow up those dumb ass props for his Fox news ready performance.

[hyped78]

Anyways, the latest polling shows an even split between the GOP and Democrats.

It's actually funny because given Biden's poor polling you'd think the GOP would have a major advantage.

I guess stripping people of their rights to combat "wokeness" and not really addressing economic issues doesn't really help. Neither does the January 6th hearing has really exposed a lot of the flat-out madness in the GOP.

At the end of the day, most people will vote according to their perception of how the economy is doing.

According to Five Thirty Eight's latest model, 87% chance the GOP take control of the House but control of the Senate is in toss-up territory. Georgia's Senate seat looks pivotal.

[hyped78]

Regarding Biden's approval ratings, I guess it's a case of "can they go even lower?"
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/18/polit...-us/index.html

[hyped78]

Whoa, Nellie! The things that go on here when I’m at work and can’t log in.

It's a totalitarian party

[Farealmer]

I have to say it's telling how active and personal this thread gets when someone discusses Democrats the same way many of the regulars go after Republicans.

Most of it was about trans in sports rather than about a specific democrat or policy.

[kidfresh512]

Ariz. Senate Candidate's Best Man, Former Friends Blast Him for Right-Wing Rhetoric: 'What Happened to You?'

A former close friend to Senate candidate Blake Masters now says he questions "what happened" to the Republican after Masters has made a string of controversial statements, including some about coronavirus virus and about the 2020 presidential election.

Masters, a Trump-endorsed candidate in Arizona's Republican Senate primary, is the subject of a lengthy new profile in Mother Jones, for which the outlet spoke to "more than a dozen friends and acquaintances" of the 35-year-old businessman.

Among those who spoke to the outlet about Masters is "a former college roommate," who said the candidate "was not a s-----, hateful person" in school but instead "a misinformed libertarian white 20-year-old. But honestly, they were a dime a dozen at Stanford."

Another, Collin Wedel, met Masters in middle school and went on to be the best man at his wedding. But Wedel tells Mother Jones that Masters changed with time (and, as the outlet suggests, due to influence by tech titan Peter Thiel, now a mentor to the millennial candidate).

What happened is the same thing that happened to all the rest of these fake MAGA candidates. They see dollar signs on all of the idiots that will give them money and endorsements. Straight up culty.

[hyped78]

Most of it was about trans in sports rather than about a specific democrat or policy.

Trans came after the discussion on the “woke warriors” - and their paper thin “arguments”

[JackDaw]

Sorry, what page was that on? Apologies but I can go back, read and comment.

On racism, in the UK there is a lot of it and not just against people of color. A lot of Brexit voters (but not all, of course) are racists or want to curb immigration etc. Might not be on the same scale as the US (not sure what "metric" we could use to compare that) but several european countries have different forms of racism, e.g. in Spain calling hispanics "sudacas".

Several European countries have different forms of racism?

I don’t think ANY country in the world is totally without racism.

Can anyone name one?

Which is not to say that they aren’t significant differences in extent and degree of racism from country to country, of course.

[hyped78]

Several European countries have different forms of racism?

I don’t think ANY country in the world is totally without racism.

Can anyone name one?

Which is not to say that they aren’t significant differences in extent and degree of racism from country to country, of course.

Fair point, they all do. But some European countries have very low levels of immigration and mixing of different races, namely places like Hungary, where there are less “internal targets” for racism.

In the UK, as you probably know better than I do, there are multiple targets for racism: Pakistanis, Bengalis, Polish, Romanian, Albanians, Somalis, Nigerians, the list goes on and on. Brexit, at its core - among some other things - was an attempt to curb immigration.

[Gray Lensman]

Several European countries have different forms of racism?

I don’t think ANY country in the world is totally without racism.

Can anyone name one?

Which is not to say that they aren’t significant differences in extent and degree of racism from country to country, of course.

I'd say perhaps some places in Micronesia and similar small nations that really only have one ethnic group that makes up the population.

[kidfresh512]

How ‘Stop the Steal’ Captured the American Right

Gone, for now, are the big rallies, with their open calls for violence and ostentatious displays of military-style kit, and many of those who organized them. Gone, too, are most of the election audits and other inquiries into the results convened by Republican-controlled state legislatures and local governments, investigations that failed to produce evidence of meaningful fraud. What is left in their place is an insistence — a belief, a lie or an act of motivated reasoning, depending on whom you’re talking to — that the election was stolen, which has fed a new wave of post-Trump activism on the right.

In 17 of the 27 states holding elections this year for secretary of state — the top elections officer in 24 states — at least one Republican candidate is running on the claim that the 2020 election was illegitimate, according to the States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan democracy watchdog organization. In four of the eight Republican primaries held so far, that candidate has won.

Scores of groups have organized at the state and local levels to conduct partisan audits of the 2020 election results, support officials and candidates who would do the same and run or volunteer for local positions that operate or monitor elections: the thousands of obscure pressure points in a system that most Republicans profess to believe was turned against them in 2020. Providing the oxygen for these efforts, and often working to connect them, are a cohort of national right-wing media figures and activists, many of them tied to the postelection efforts to stop the transfer of power.

It could properly be said to constitute a movement, but one that no longer gathers under the banner of “Stop the Steal,” preferring the good-government language of “election integrity” — though the movement has next to nothing in common with earlier efforts to shore up genuine vulnerabilities in the American election system. It is in essence a new iteration of Stop the Steal, one whose attentions have shifted from the last election to the next one, and the one beyond that.

When I asked Stockton whether he had applied the lessons from his time on the Tea Party Express bus to his months on the Stop the Steal bus, he replied that it went far beyond that. “We were using a lot of the same people who organized our Tea Party rallies to organize the bus-tour rallies,” he told me. Traveling across the country a decade before had given him a detailed knowledge of the atlas of American anger. Revisiting its geography on a new bus, for a new cause, he saw not just the same local organizers but also crowds that he reckoned were perhaps two-thirds Tea Party veterans.

Their ranks were swelled by new recruits radicalized by the Covid lockdowns, which many of the Stop the Steal organizers, including Kremer, had also rallied against. Those protests had also drawn in a cohort of far-right evangelical leaders, who had portrayed the lockdowns — which imposed prolonged restrictions on church attendance — as a secular elite campaign against Christians. Their rhetoric would carry over to Stop the Steal, which accused many of the same Democratic governors and state officials of rigging the election against Trump with the expansions of absentee voting during the pandemic.

Long article, a deep dive connecting the tendrils of Tea party movement to what became Stop The Steal. How it morphed now even after all the failures to prove any fraud and them focusing on getting control of elections themselves and running as candidates. The interviews with these people and the shared delusion and idea that 'some people' don't deserve to have a say.

We talk about them everyday and reading about their delusion is tiring but important honestly because they don't just vanish. Everyone should be watching where these people go. What power they gain after all these lies and efforts. Where are they being elected. Some of these people actually will get into office and have power to some degree. Over school boards, election boards, our courts, Congress.