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

[Jack Dracula]

Republicans have been treating empathy like it's a weakness for decades.

Which, having empathy is the truest strength of someone's character.

Empathy leads to trying to help our less fortunate citizens, which costs money, which could lead to raising taxes on our most fortunate citizens so the GOP shuts that **** down PDQ.

[The Cool Thatguy]

An Indian official has been suspended from his job for wasting hundreds of thousands of gallons of water after ordering a reservoir drained in a bid to find his cellphone.

So glad to know that massive stupidity isn't exclusive to America.

[SUPERECWFAN1]

Lets be honest , if this was an IPhone 14 he would have been alright to do this. In fact he could have drained a river to get that back if possible.

[godisawesome]

Empathy leads to trying to help our less fortunate citizens, which costs money, which could lead to raising taxes on our most fortunate citizens so the GOP shuts that **** down PDQ.

…and for those who don’t have massive amounts of cash (and a few of those who do, and who dislike pangs of conscience intruding on their self-image), there’s a self-narrative and identity reason to try finding a way to codify empathy and compassion as a weakness, or even, on some twisted level, a vice.

Greater awareness of you fellow man leads to being aware of inequity, and of the capacity for society to try addressing it as both the micro- and macro-level… and of how to recognize actions that go against that.

If you decided some time ago that “Number go up!” was the sign of virtue, strength, and righteousness, whether that be the number on the bank account or the stock market, you don’t then want it pointed out that the number going up is the result of other people work far harder than you have in excruciating, soul-crushing conditions, or that you’ve caused immense suffering for minimal improvement of the world… and on top of that, you donkt want to hear about success stories where someone valued different stuff and had both a measurable secular *and* spiritual improvement on the world.

If you want your hero to be the jet-setting tycoon who’s luxuries you want, you’re going to loathe hearing that he’s a spoiled brat from a murderous slave master who worked people to death for diamonds, isn’t actually all that smart, and has had less positive impact than, say, a community leader mobilizing a gun buy back or a soup kitchen for migrant workers.

[Tendrin]

https://www.rawstory.com/ron-desanti..._section_start

"Most of the people that support you probably voted for President Trump twice. And the first comment I hear over and over again is, 'Why doesn't Ron DeSantis wait for President Trump's second term and then run?' And what is your best answer to that? Why is right now the time for Ron DeSantis to run for president?" host Will Cain asked.

"Because" DeSantis boasted, "everyone knows if I'm the nominee, I will beat Biden, uh, and I will serve two terms and I will be able to, uh, destroy leftism in this country and leave woke ideology on the dustbin of history."

I don't need to point out what would happen if a liberal said anything remotely similar about 'destroying conservatism', and what the unequal treatment of these two notions would receive if the positions were reversed. We all know *exactly* what kind of shitstorm would emerge. It's just another example of the asymmetry of our politics.

[Username taken]

Lets be honest , if this was an IPhone 14 he would have been alright to do this. In fact he could have drained a river to get that back if possible.

The guy probably has some super-duper embarrassing stuff on the phone.

Stuff he probably can't explain to anyone.

[SUPERECWFAN1]

The guy probably has some super-duper embarrassing stuff on the phone.

Stuff he probably can't explain to anyone.

The odds the phone would ever be found at the bottom there was so remote though. Like it's something no one would really search for and if someone did find it...it was broken from water damage.

[CaptainEurope]

https://www.rawstory.com/ron-desanti..._section_start



I don't need to point out what would happen if a liberal said anything remotely similar about 'destroying conservatism', and what the unequal treatment of these two notions would receive if the positions were reversed. We all know *exactly* what kind of shitstorm would emerge. It's just another example of the asymmetry of our politics.

To fascists, plurality of opinion is a problem to solve. By any means they deam necessary.

[Vakanai]

I like how conservatives say they want to destroy "woke ideology" without explaining that woke ideology is basically "address systemic injustices" like racism and misogyny. It allows them to say what they've wanted to say all along without having to actually say "I want to leave the notion that women deserve equal pay as men and that I shouldn't set up black men to fail and fall or remain in poverty or the prison system to the dustbin of history!" Because that's what they're always actually talking about.

[CaptainEurope]

Angry, violent and abusive: Unsealed court docs allege Stewart Rhodes created ‘constant fear’ at home

Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes — a key figure in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol — beat his kids, used the toilet in their presence, encouraged them to use drugs and harbored an “obsession with sex (that) led him to incredibly inappropriate behavior around the children,” newly released court filings obtained by Raw Story allege.

A 2018 affidavit, filed by Rhodes’ ex-wife, Tasha Adams, as part of her divorce proceedings, alleged that Rhodes’ emotional and physical abuse of their children included punching and choking them.

The affidavit — which Rhodes said in his own court filing “twisted over 23 years of facts” — also alleges that Rhodes’ abuse included the family’s pets.

“Stewart has also kicked, hit, and punched the dogs in front of the children so many times,” the affidavit said. “One time he racked his pistols and almost shot our puppy in front of all the children.”

The allegations against Rhodes included gross violations of his children’s privacy.

“When he still lived with us Stewart insisted on going into the bathroom and using the toilet while the girls were showering,” the document states. “(One of his daughters) noticed a direct correlation between his insistence on using the bathroom while the girls were showering and his mood.

“The angrier he was, the more likely he was to force the door open or to order them not to use the lock I had installed on the bathroom door,” the document continues. “Eventually, he broke the lock. He would tell them to just close the curtain while he sat down.”
The document also cited another allegation about Rhodes’ behavior involving one of his daughters.

“Stewart told her all about how he used to get paid (during our marriage) to have sex with other men's wives while they watched,” the affidavit states. “He described what they paid him to do, how he found partners using Craigslist, and that it was all basically a charitable act because some of these men were disabled.”

One alleged incident involved Rhodes watching pornography at the kitchen table with the volume turned up and his children present.

“The older children said they would turn up the TV to drown out the noise so the little ones couldn't hear,” the document says.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Here is Trump's most uplifting Memorial Day message:

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2015, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profiled Michael Peroutka, a former member of the Constitution Party who ran for president on that ticket back in 2004, and in 2014, shifted his party to Republican to run for a seat on the Maryland Arundel County Council. While his current political rank might seem pretty low compared to being a one-time presidential candidate, Peroutka is a worthy enough person to profile for his influence, as he has long been a financial supporter of dim-witted Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore, in his quest to violate the separation of church and state that our Constitution guarantees by putting Ten Commandments monuments up in courthouses. But that’s not where Peroutka’s extremism stops… he’s also a long time member of the NeoConfederate group, the League of the South, and when called out on that fact, once responded, “I’m not a Neo-Confederate, if anything I want to be just a True Confederate.” We covered an extensive list of racist and homophobic comments from Peroutka, as well as his calls to arrest all women who get abortions, and using his media profile to claim that Planned Parenthood stalks children and hopes they get pregnant so they can abort their own unborn children. He’s also disgustingly anti-science, to boot, having donated an allosaurus skeleton to a Creationalist museum that teaches children the Earth is only 4,300 years old, and that the Columbine shooting massacre happened because evolution was being taught in public schools. We cannot describe him as terrifyingly bigoted and insane… but at least he doesn’t hold a higher office than he does.

It was in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022, that “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” presented its original profile of the four term U.S. House Representative for Illinois’ 16th Congressional District, Adam Kinzinger. While some who only have followed the most current events are probably like, “WHUH? How the heck is one of the only Republicans rejecting Donald Trump one of the ‘crazy’ ones?” Well, our memory goes back a bit farther. We’re talking about a guy who not only bought into the Center for Medical Progress’ bogus “sting” video that illegally taped a Planned Parenthood executive and compared the fraudulent footage to concentration Camp experiments on conservative talk radio. And it’s part of that sort of reaction that the GOP had that served as a stochastic terror trigger to send a man named Robert Lewis Dear over the edge, and to shoot up a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs. But Kinzinger wasn’t satisfied with the violence his party incited, that day, not at all. During the five hour siege that left three people dead, and many others hospitalized or pinned inside the building, Adam Kinzinger was live on CNN, and said he expected an apology from Planned Parenthood if it turned out they were not the intended target of the shooter. We’ll repeat that… Kinzinger demanded an apology from the organization attacked while there was still gunfire being heard, and an active shooter was still attacking them. Kinzinger has never apologized for his remarks. His voting record also is highly conservative across the board, and not surprisingly, very much so on abortion rights. In 2020, Kinzinger criticized Wisconsin’s Democratic Gov. Tony Evers for removing National Guard troops from the U.S./Mexico border that were requested to be sent there by Donald Trump. Kinzinger is a reservist, and could have faced discipline for publicly criticizing his own orders to stand down. The theory was at the time that he probably only made the statement in the first place to win the approval of Trump, and hope it would allow him to be named Air Force Secretary (maybe he held a grudge when his name didn’t get called)… And as Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic by simply issuing stay-at-home orders to keep the public safe also led to Kinzinger chiming in to be on the wrong side of history. All we know is that for his “betrayal” of Donald Trump, the Republican Party made it impossible for Adam Kinzinger to win re-election in 2022. As he will now remain a footnote in the GOP’s descent into madness who wasn’t willing to defend a failed coup attempt, we will set aside his profile for now to showcase another wacky Republican today instead. (Current crazy/stupid scoreboard, is now 1210-60, since this was established in July 2014.

[worstblogever]

Mariannette Miller-Meeks
Welcome to what is the 1210th original profile here at “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day”, where we’ll be discussing the U.S. House Representative from Iowa’s 1st Congressional District, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, who won election to her first term in office in Iowa’s 2nd District in 2020, by winning with all of 6 votes in the general election in one of the last few true swing districts in the country, on account that Iowa Republicans certified the victory before counting 22 votes that would have swung the race to her opponent, Rita Hart, by nine votes.This was the fourth time she ran for office in that district after failing to unseat former Democratic Congressman Dave Loebsack on three different occasions in 2008, 2010, and 2014. She did serve one term in the Iowa State Senate from 2019-2020 before finally getting to DC. In 2022, Miller-Meeks ran in Iowa’s 1st Congressional District instead, preferring the Republican lean but now representing a District she doesn’t even live in (Iowa state law only requires someone live in the state, not the district.)

She is yet another Republican doctor in Congress, and by that we mean ophthalmologist who seems to ignore medical science when it’s politically convenient, like repeatedly leaving their nose out of a mask during a pandemic, refusing to be interviewed by any reporter smart enough to wear one, if not refusing to wear one all together. and wanting children unmasked in schools so they could get sick before the crisis was under control.

One of the biggest knocks on Miller-Meeks early in her legislative career has been her absolute absence of ethics, given that she had to have watchdog groups call her out on not including hundreds of thousands of dollars in assets on her financial disclosure forms. Just, whoops, forgot to mention I have three quarter of a million dollars lying around, no biggie.

Red flag number two? Her campaign staff apparently included domestic terrorists from the white nationalist Three Percenters militia group, as evidenced when Miller-Meeks’ husband posted photos of her crew getting ready to send out new signs, and the workers were posing in front of a Three Percenter flag. Nice company they’re keeping. Her campaign manager also had the totally not white nationalist response to the reporting on this to try to “whataboutism” the problem away by saying that Black Lives Matter is a terrorist group (it isn’t).

The other big criticism? She’s full of crap. She campaigned in 2020 on improving the country’s infrastructure, calling it her “top priority”, but stupidly proposing an increase on fuel tax to pay for it. Lo and behold, when the bill to improve infrastructure came before the House in 2021, she voted against it.

But that’s far from her only glaring moment of idiocy as a legislator:

• January 6th, 2021: Mariannette Miller-Meeks votes for the objection to the electoral college’s votes in the 2020 election, a failure to send any sort of message that he wasn’t intimidated or sympathetic to those who attacked the Capitol to attempt a violent coup.
• January 13th, 2021: Rep. Miller-Meeks votes against the second impeachment of Donald Trump, because the Republican Party no longer feels like they should be accountable for anything, including failed coups that result in the deaths of both their participants and police officers.
• February 4th, 2021: Mariannette Miller-Meeks votes to keep Marjorie Taylor Greene’s committee assignments, because he wouldn’t want her to be accountable for all the bigoted remarks and conspiracy theories she’s spread online (probably because she’s a kindred spirit).
• February 25th, 2021: Miller-Meeks votes against HR 5, the latest version of the Equality Act, that would provide workplace protections for LGBTQ Americans.
• March 3rd, 2021: Rep. Miller-Meeks votes against HR 1, a bill created to prevent the corruption of money in politics, and protect voter access to the ballot box.
• March 3rd, 2021: Mariannette Miller-Meeks votes against the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021.
• March 10th, 2021: Miller-Meeks votes against the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, because she feels people deserve to die in poverty during a pandemic.
• November 5th, 2021: Mariannette Miller-Meeks votes against HR 3684, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
• May 18th, 2022: Mariannette Miller-Meeks is one of 192 Republicans who vote against HR 7790, to create supplemental funding for infant formula (while claiming to be pro- life).
• May 18th, 2022: Rep. Miller-Meeks votes against HR 350, the Domestic Violence Prevention Act, because these days, a plank of the Republican Party is ostensibly domestic terror.
• May 19th, 2022: Miller-Meeks votes against HR 7688, a bill which would help prevent gas companies from gouging customers on prices.
• July 15th, 2022: Mariannette Miller-Meeks votes against House Amendment 262, which would require the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and Secretary of Defense to publish a report on the infiltration of American law enforcement by Neo-Nazis and white supremacists, offer measures to be taken to remove them from their ranks, and prevent further infiltration by others.
• July 21st, 2022: Miller-Meeks is one of 195 Republicans who vote against the Right to Contraception Act, which codified the right of Americans to have access to birth control.
• December 6th, 2022: Miller-Meeks, embracing the GOP’s white nationalist, anti-immigrant sentiment votes against HR 7946, which was meant to honor the promise to grant citizenship to immigrants who served in the United States Armed Forces.

She is currently trying to get TikTok banned in the United States, going the “won’t someone think of the children!?!?” route, but also mentioning she thinks it’s a national security risk, presumably because its owner has the nerve to be Chinese. This is the sort of behavior you’d expect as she has to pander to the crustiest of old Republicans to continue to win office and get to lie on her disclosure forms. Maybe Iowa’s 1st District might consider running someone who doesn’t even live there out of office, especially as she’s chomping at the bit to try to restrict abortion nationally. Which, again, she’s completely full of crap, given back in 2018, she claimed to be pro-choice and respected Roe v. Wade.

The fact that someone this ethically corrupt, who tries pretending they don’t hire white nationalists to work on their campaign, or who tries touting their medical credentials while ignoring all reason and putting lives at risk has served two terms in office is frustrating, especially given if Democrats had refused to seat her and fought, she might have never served a day.

[worstblogever]

Empathy leads to trying to help our less fortunate citizens, which costs money, which could lead to raising taxes on our most fortunate citizens so the GOP shuts that **** down PDQ.

At this point, I'm starting to think a requirement of a modern Republican is not to have any empathy, as well as a lack of a gag reflex, to not start vomiting upon all the things said by the MAGA faithful that are their voting base, and now, largely their party's core elected representatives. Everyone with either of those two things went for the exits.

[Agent Z]

‘Murderers’ and ‘criminals’: Meteorologists face unprecedented harassment from conspiracy theorists

“Murderers.” “Criminals.” “We are watching you.”

These are just a handful of the threats and abuse sent to meteorologists at AEMET, Spain’s national weather agency, in recent months. They come via social media, its website, letters, phone calls – even in the form of graffiti sprayed across one of its buildings.

Abuse and harassment “have always happened” against the agency’s scientists, Estrella Gutiérrez-Marco, spokesperson for AEMET, told CNN.

But there has been a rapid rise recently, coinciding with extreme weather in Spain. A severe drought has shrunk water levels to alarming lows, exacerbated by record-breaking April temperatures.

The abuse got so bad that in April, AEMET posted a video on Twitter calling for an end to the harassment, and asking for respect. Even the government intervened. Teresa Ribera, Spain’s minister for the ecological transition, posted on Twitter in support of the agency: “Lying, giving wings to conspiracy and fear, insulting … It is time to say enough.”

The harassment of meteorologists by conspiracy theorists and climate deniers is not a phenomenon confined to Spain.

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/27/w...ntl/index.html