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

[numberthirty]

What are the chances that the bill congress is putting forward to avoid the rail road strike will pass? Is there any talk of any one blocking it?

That's a pretty "Rose Colored Glasses..." way to look at what it is they actually intend on doing there...

[numberthirty]

The Only thing I heard on it is Sanders will try and block it if they dont put the sick time the unions want in the bill. I figured the GOP would block it to make Biden look bad but I am not sure.

It has me pretty worried.

There's not much of a reason to block something that you can rightly beat Democrats over the head with.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

There's not much of a reason to block something that you can rightly beat Democrats over the head with.

And how does that help the American people as a rail strike could damage the economy?

Oops! I forgot the GQP doesn’t give a damn about their constituents. Silly me.

[Godzilla2099]

We have a confession.

Attachment 126544

I'm confused. I thought Trump said the FBI planted those documents that he declassified

[Tami]

I'm confused. I thought Trump said the FBI planted those documents that he declassified

He also said that the FBI were really searching for Hillary Clinton's missing emails when they found the planted documents that he declassified.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

He also said that the FBI were really searching for Hillary Clinton's missing emails when they found the planted documents that he declassified.

Trump is living proof of that old saying: “It is better to remain silent and be thought of as a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”

[worstblogever]

Trump is living proof of that old saying: “It is better to remain silent and be thought of as a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”

And that he doesn't listen to his legal counsel, but at least he doesn't pay them for the advice he refuses to take.

[worstblogever]

On this date, in 2014, in 2015, and in 2016, "Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day" published profiles of Charles Van Zant, from the Florida House of Representatives. This fervent social conservative has repeatedly tried passing laws to completely outlaw abortion, which he has compared to the Holocaust, and says kills 1 in 4 African American children in the United States, making it even deadlier for them than the Ku Klux Klan. Seriously, he went there. Van Zant was also highly concerned that Common Core education is “turning all the children gay”, and has repeatedly pushed for legislation that would instead allow prayer in public schools (in spite of that sort of thing being unconstitutional via our separation of church and state). While those painfully stupid misconceptions might be enough to get someone booted for office, inexplicably no one has run against Van Zant in a primary or general election since he first won office in 2008. For four consecutive election cycles, this boob has been allowed to help make Florida… well… Florida. As we also mentioned in our 2015 profile, Charles Van Zant couldn’t stand the thought of missing out on trying to outlaw abortion or stopping homosexuality from being, y’know, tolerated in our society. So he decided he would govern by proxy, and his wife Katherine was going to run for the seat he has to give up in January. And just when it seemed like that would come to pass, both Mr. and Mrs. Van Zant were revealed by the media to have illegitimately claimed a homestead exemption on their taxes since 2008 on a property that no one actually lives in. Defrauding your local government out of thousands of dollars in bogus tax breaks was enough to cause Katherine Van Zant to lose the GOP primary to her opponent, so both Charles and his wife are now out of Florida politics.

On this date in 2017, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profiled Mark Assini, who very nearly unseated Democratic Congresswoman Louise Slaughter in New York’s 25th District in the 2014 elections, coming within about 1,000 votes of doing so and refusing to concede the election to her until eight days later. In 2016, he figured he’d give it another shot, but things did not quite go according to plan, mostly because old blog posts written by Assini back from 2005-2009 were discovered where he had some delightful opinions about the LGBTQ community. Oh, sorry, did we say delightful? We meant hateful and bigoted. Links to those articles show Assini agreeing with a reader who called members of the LGBTQ community "sexual deviants" and quoting a pastor who called transgender individuals "mentally disturbed." But the best quote was probably that he wanted the only openly gay Congressman at the time, Barney Frank, jailed for imagined crimes, and threw in a prison rape joke while he was at it, writing, “Barney Frank should go to prison. Old Barney would have plenty of dates along with three squares and cable TV.” There were also plenty of press releases from Assini that made misleading and xenophobic claims about illegal immigrants committing crimes in the United States. Assini has not resurfaced yet in politics.

On this date in 2018, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profile, where we’ll be talking about Joshua Youssef, a candidate for New Hampshire State Senate back in 2012 who lost in the general election with 41% of the vote, and that may have had something to do with the fact his ex-wife’s attorney had a blog that noted that Youssef was behind on paying both child support, as well as numerous tax debts, and that story started to get covered by the local media. Youssef then tried to “bury the lede” by creating his own version of the lawyer’s blog that would praise himself, and discredit the lawyer, but the state attorney general had to bring Youssef up on charges of election fraud. And, being terrible to his former spouse, a tax cheat, and convicted felon wasn’t enough to stop Donald Trump from hiring Youssef to head his 2016 presidential campaign headquarters in Belknap County. He was also a delegate sent to the 2016 Republican National Convention to cast his vote there for Trump, but alas, with “very good people” like Joshua Youssef working for Donald Trump in New Hampshire, that wasn’t enough to help him win the state in the 2016 election over Hillary Clinton. So instead, when Donald Trump claimed that Clinton won the state due to “voter fraud” and that illegal voters were brought in by bus to help her win the campaign (with no evidence whatsoever of this happening), Joshua Youssef furthered the theory. And by that, we mean he went on CNN to be interviewed by Alisyn Camerota and lie his arse off. Youssef was called out for believing such a paranoid conspiracy theory, and forced to slowly back away from the story. To sum up so far… Donald Trump hired a man convicted of election fraud to run his campaign, who then tried accusing Democrats of election fraud without evidence, and had to backpedal after being caught in such an easy lie. Now, these reasons would probably be enough to earn a CSGOPOTD profile and for us to call it a day. But Joshua Youssef is much, much more dangerous and odious of a human being. It wasn’t long ago that we also had a profile of Robert Fisher, a former New Hampshire state legislator who was outed for creating a Reddit group called “The Red Pill” that defended raping women, and offered advice to “men’s rights activists” about how to get away with the crime. And when Robert Fisher had a day job at a business called Same Day Computer, you’ll never guess who his boss was… Joshua Youssef. Who also ended up being outed as a “Men’s Rights activist” whose bitter divorce had him posting hateful things about women and feminists online as well. We’re glad Youssef has never won an election, and now it seems a done deal that he never will.

On this date in 2019, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profiled Mike Kennedy, a former member of the Utah House of Representatives from 2013-2019 in District 27.Kennedy’s former district, as it is… is about as conservative as you’ll find of any one in the state, and all Kennedy had to do was survive the GOP Primary and could cake walk into re-election in the state legislature, winning with 92% in 2012, 88% in 2014, and 100% in 2016 because he was completely unopposed. Kennedy is both a doctor, with a MD from Michigan State, as well as a lawyer with a JD from Brigham Young University. And that’s why it was kind of mind-blowing to see such an educated guy speak before the Utah House of Representatives in 2014, and claim that more poor people would die if they had proper access to healthcare, saying,”Sometimes access to healthcare can be damaging and dangerous… I’ve heard from National Institutes of Health and otherwise that we’re killing up to a million, a million and a half people every year in our hospitals. And it’s access to hospitals that’s killing those people.” Fearmongering about dangerous hospitals… when you’re a doctor? WHAT? But maybe Mike Kennedy doesn’t know what’s dangerous and what’s not. After all, he’ll hang out with pro-gun groups extreme enough that they appear in towns where the Parkland survivors are to auction off assault rifles and insult those gun violence survivors. Other than that, Mike Kennedy is a big defender of Trump administration immigration policies, and as a legislator, voted against a bill to end discrimination based on sexual orientation, voted to return to using the firing squad as a means of execution for capital crimes, voted against the Medicaid Expansion, and even voted against a bill to outlaw bigamy in Utah. So here’s the thing… if Kennedy’s district was so conservative, how did he end up losing office? Well, delusions of grandeur being what they are, with the retiring of Sen. Orrin Hatch, Kennedy thought it was time to move up into the big leagues, and run for U.S. Senate. There’s just one catch to that plan… another Republican had designs on that Senate seat… and his name is Mitt Romney. Kennedy got 52% of the votes… at the Utah Republican Party convention. When voting was opened up to the public, he was crushed at the polls, and only got 28% of the vote. He did not run for his old seat in 2020.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2020, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profiled Eric Redman, who was a member of the Idaho House of Representatives in District 2B from 2014 through 2018. Redman was actively pushing policy based on the advice of an anti-Muslim hate group, and got called out for those efforts by the Southern Poverty Law Center. This wasn’t actively the toughest case to crack, as two days before Eric Redman sponsored HB 419, a bill that targeted the threat of Sharia Law in the United States, ACT for America was already hyping the legislation on their website. Now, never mind that the threat of Sharia Law on the rise that doesn’t actually exist, there might as well be a law about preventing unicorn attacks… but even if someone was intent on establishing Sharia Law anywhere in the country, such laws would be immediately invalidated as unconstitutional via the establishment clause of the First Amendment that prevents a separation of church and state. Hatemongers and bigots tend to not deal in facts, or have a keen understanding of basic civics classes. But we won’t bury the lede… Eric Redman was in cahoots with a hate group to let them know his plans. Upon further research via a FOIA request, the SPLC determined there had been no less than 47 e-mails exchanged between Redman and ACT for America over just 15 months. He submitted multiple bills aimed at “foreign laws”, one of which included illustrations of a hand about to be chopped off, and another image of a man about to be beheaded that made it pretty clear what sorts of folks Redman was talking about in bigoted terms. While in his final attempt to get a bill passed in Idaho, Redman was pretending the bill wasn’t aimed at Muslims, it’s interesting to note that he shared videos on social media that fear-mongered about Islam. Eric Redman made a 2017 announcement that he would not run for a third term in the Idaho State Legislature, around the time the SPLC were hot on his heels, and Redman began a campaign to try and oust fellow Republicans who didn’t go along with the plan set forth by his favorite hate group. It may come as little surprise that when you peek at his overall voting record, he voted to have the Bible put into public school classrooms as a teaching aid, voted for “Stand Your Ground” laws in Idaho, for ridiculously strict abortion restrictions, supported a bill to remove members of the judiciary that support same sex marriage, and even against a minimum wage increase in the greatest period of income inequality in our nation’s history.

On this date in 2021, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profiled Lavern Spicer, a 2020 and 2022 candidate for U.S. House of Representatives in Florida’s 24th Congressional District, who had the benefit of there being no GOP Primary for the seat, and thus she was the only candidate on the ballot for them. She is yet another in a long line of Republicans who ran for Congress in 2020 who were also adherents of the Qanon conspiracy theory. She repeatedly linked to a Q video called “The Fall of the Cabal”, that was the tip of the spear for many supporters of the conspiracy theory for first learning of it. Lavern Spicer got absolutely wrecked by Frederica Wilson on Election Day in 2020, getting just 20% of the vote. She immediately regrouped for a 2022 campaign, but does not seem like she’ll be having much more luck, considering the headlines she drew for her take on Kyree Irving of the Brooklyn Nets’ refusing to get the Covid-19 vaccine, and thus making himself ineligible to practice or play with teammates per New York’s pandemic guidelines. Upon hearing there was a fellow anti-vaxx loon out there getting skewered by the media for his stance, Lavern Spicer got on Twitter to try to show she didn’t understand several things by compariing it to when Magic Johnson played with HIV for a season in the 90s. In the comments, people reminder her HIV wasn’t an airborne virus, that there is no vaccine for it, or that players don’t have penetrative sex mid-game. It was noteworthy that the main media outlet touting her as a candidate is RT, aka Russia Today. She lost in the GOP Primary in 2022, getting just 35% of the vote. As she is now a two-time loser and seems unlikely to ever reach office, lwe’ll set aside his profile at this time to cover another wacky Republican today instead. (Current crazy/stupid scoreboard, is now 1158-55, since this was established in July 2014.


Jake Loubriel
Welcome to what is the 1158th original profile here at “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day”, where we’re profiling Jake Loubriel, a 2022 candidate for U.S. Senate in Florida who was hoping to upset Senator Marco Rubio in the GOP Primary in that race. Our profile of him shouldn’t take too long, because at this point, how many times can we profile a Republican candidate for office who propagated and promoted the Qanon conspiracy theory, as he did?

He also has fun hobbies like making racist posts online where he flashes white nationalist hand gestures, or wearing Captain America/Punisher themed tactical gear to show he’s a big manly man and in no way overcompensating for anything.

Jake Loubriel was disqualified from running and didn’t make it onto the 2022 ballot in the end. Seems to be nobody minded much.

[CaptainEurope]

Leader of Oath Keepers and Oath Keepers Member Found Guilty of Seditious Conspiracy and Other Charges Related to U.S. Capitol Breach

“Today the jury returned a verdict convicting all defendants of criminal conduct, including two Oath Keepers leaders for seditious conspiracy against the United States,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. “The Justice Department is committed to holding accountable those criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy on January 6, 2021. The prosecutors and agents on this case worked tirelessly, with extraordinary skill, and in the best traditions of the Department of Justice.”

“As this case shows, breaking the law in an attempt to undermine the functioning of American democracy will not be tolerated,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray. “The FBI will always uphold the rights of all citizens who peacefully engage in First Amendment protected activities, but we and our partners will continue to hold accountable those who engaged in illegal acts regarding the January 6, 2021, siege on the U.S. Capitol.”

“This case reaffirms the strength of our democracy and the institutions that protect and preserve it, including our criminal justice system,” said U.S. Attorney Matthew M. Graves for the District of Columbia. “Over a period of many weeks, a fair and impartial jury heard evidence in a search for the truth of the conduct of these defendants before, during, and after the events of Jan. 6, 2021.”

“Democracy depends on the peaceful transfer of power. By attempting to block the certification of the 2020 presidential election results, the defendants flouted and trampled the rule of law,” said Assistant Director in Charge Steven M. D’Antuono of the FBI Washington Field Office. “This case shows that force and violence are no match for our country’s justice system.”

Rhodes, 57, of Granbury, Texas, also was found guilty of obstruction of an official proceeding and tampering with documents and proceedings. Meggs, 53, of Dunnellon, Florida, also was found guilty of conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to prevent an officer from discharging duties, and tampering with documents or proceedings.

[Tami]

Leader of Oath Keepers and Oath Keepers Member Found Guilty of Seditious Conspiracy and Other Charges Related to U.S. Capitol Breach

I hope this is just the start and not the end. There are others out there potentially just as guilty if not more so.

[CaptainEurope]

This trial is very important to ensure future elections in the US remain democratic:

The judge overseeing an Atlanta-area grand jury probe into Donald Trump’s effort to subvert the 2020 election ruled Wednesday that Georgia’s Republican Party Chairman, David Shafer, may not share an attorney with 10 other GOP activists who served as false electors on behalf of Trump’s campaign.

Judge Robert McBurney said that while the criminal exposure for those “alternate electors” may be limited and relatively comparable, Shafer is in a different category because of his central role as an organizer of the effort. As a result, McBurney ruled, Shafer may not share lawyers with his 10 colleagues.

“Given the information before the Court about his role in establishing and convening the slate of alternate electors, his communications with other key players in the District Attorney’s investigation, and his role in other post-election efforts to call into question the validity of the official vote count in Georgia, the Court finds that he is substantively differently situated,” McBurney ruled in a seven-page opinion.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/1...ctors-00071369

[Jack Dracula]

Musk's Twitter No Longer Bans COVID and Vaccine Misinformation.

Twitter will no longer enforce its policy against coronavirus misinformation, worrying experts who say the move could have serious consequences in the midst of a still-deadly pandemic.
The rollback of Twitter’s covid-19 misinformation policy is just the latest pivot since Elon Musk took control of the company a month ago.

Twitter introduced its policy against covid misinformation in 2020 during the early days of the pandemic. Since then, the company had suspended more than 11,000 accounts and removed more than 100,000 pieces of content for violating the policy, according to a report from the company. Several high-profile figures ran afoul of the policy, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), whose personal account was suspended in January for violating the policy by casting doubt on the efficacy of coronavirus vaccines. Her account was reinstated last week.

Experts in public health praised Twitter’s efforts to tamp down on covid misinformation. In a 2021 advisory report to technology platforms, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy cited Twitter’s policy as an example of how tech companies should go about combating misinformation.

“Health misinformation is a serious threat to public health,” Murthy wrote. “It can cause confusion, sow mistrust, harm people’s health, and undermine public health efforts. Limiting the spread of health misinformation is a moral and civic imperative that will require a whole-of-society effort.”
However, Twitter has also struggled to police misinformation accurately and recently began labeling some factual information about covid as misinformation and banning scientists and researchers who attempted to warn the public of the long-term harm of covid on the body. As of last weekend, many tweets promoting anti-vaccine content and covid misinformation remained on the platform

The main problem may be, with people being fired or quitting at a high rate, there may not be enough employees left to moderate effectively. This doesn't bode well for blocking other kinds of misinformation and anti-social content in the near future.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Musk's Twitter No Longer Bans COVID and Vaccine Misinformation.









The main problem may be, with people being fired or quitting at a high rate, there may not be enough employees left to moderate effectively. This doesn't bode well for blocking other kinds of misinformation and anti-social content in the near future.

Which, I suspect, was Muskrat’s intent all along, letting ALL the bad actors back in under the tissue paper thin pretext of “defending free speech”.

[scourge]

Which, I suspect, was Muskrat’s intent all along, letting ALL the bad actors back in under the tissue paper thin pretext of “defending free speech”.

Meanwhile banning anyone they declare "antifa" or "sjw" ...which turns out to be anyone who doesn't agree with all the right-wing crap Musk and his moronic buddies spew.