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

[aja_christopher]

What's an assumption in the question "What is a more important question on immigration than what the limiting principle should be?" that a person being questioned might disagree with?

You know exactly what your assumption is because you've already argued it repeatedly -- namely that Democrats want open borders.

It's a useless discussion when someone points out any facts counter to your narrative and you just handwave them away with your own opinion.

For example: "Democrats want open borders not based on their factual record but because I read some articles about it, and Republicans aren't really bigoted -- just acceptably bigoted enough to routinely suppress minority votes and LGBT rights and to abuse the human rights of "illegals" due to concerns of an "invasion" that has inspired some on the right to actively attack and kill said people of color here in America."

It's easy to imagine people in Germany making the same exact arguments while Hitler gathered power in his country.

The more you keep trying to push the false "open borders" narrative the more it reveals how little you care that your party is racist, homophobic, sexist, corrupt, and incompetent at it's core -- if you cared about true objectivity then you would discuss said issues objectively, but instead you keep trying to frame the discussion on your own terms with "loaded" questioning because you know you have no defense for Republican behavior.

One could easily ask you why you don't concern yourself with placing "limiting principles" on the factual Republican bigotry and corruption that exists in reality more so than the hypothetical open borders that only exist in your imagination.

But the answer is obvious and asking you would lead to a dozen more pages or so of deflection -- it wouldn't do anything whatsoever to address the problem so asking you anything on said matters when you often refuse to answer honestly and directly is generally a waste of time and effort.

Your arguments remind me of how some will distract you with idle conversation while their partners rob you blind.

That said, I expect you to keep doing so even as your party suppresses the rights of minorities and continues to drive America into the gutter.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

At Least 5 Million People Globally Have Been Infected With COVID-19

The World Health Organization warned Wednesday that the outbreak was far from over. “We still have a long way to go in this pandemic,” the agency’s chief said.

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In Suits Over Pandemic Conditions, Guards And Prisoners Find Themselves On The Same Side

As the coronavirus rages through prisons, staffers are also exposed, anxious and overworked.

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Pastor Who Claimed To Cure Coronavirus With Faith Dies Of Coronavirus

Frankline Ndifor had claimed to cure the COVID-19 infection in Cameroon via the laying of hands. The irony is considerable.

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What Cities Could Look Like In A Post-Coronavirus World

After the COVID-19 pandemic, our cities will need us more than ever. And we’ll need them, too.

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Here’s How Most Americans Really Feel About Wearing Face Masks

If there’s a culture war over masks, someone forgot to tell most of the public, a new survey finds. SPOILER ALERT: 62 percent of people are in favor of wearing masks.

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Volunteers Recite The Names Of Thousands Of Coronavirus Victims In Online Vigil

The 24-hour marathon reading, organized by clergy and community activists, seeks to humanize COVID-19’s death toll.

[Steel Inquisitor]

I mean, they didn't call Obama the deporter in chief for nothing, right? Did the GOP force him to do that too?

This is a very telling response. Don't conflate what Trump's doing with Democrats, it reveals your true motives. This isn't about immigration or marginalised groups or even borders it's about hurting the Democrats.

[worstblogever]

Sorry I was off the board yesterday and didn't post a CSGOPOTD. Non-lethal ailment. We'll make up for lost time with two today...

In 2015, as well as 2016, and 2017, that "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" published profiles of Mark Reed, who on three occasions has failed to get elected to U.S. Congress to represent California’s 30th Congressional District, having gone down in defeat to Rep. Mark Sherman all three times. And we don’t mean he lost, as much as got crushed. Reed, for whatever reason in his debate against Sherman, tried attacking him and DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz of not being supportive enough of Israel, which is amazing in that both not only have records that show they are supportive of Israel, but they’re also both coincidentally Jewish, to boot. Reed has a website loaded with misleading information about the Affordable Care Act, his opposition to same-sex marriage, as well as climate change denial. Perhaps the best reason to not elect him to office is his long police record featuring two arrests for narcotics possession. His 2016 campaign website featured an inspirational quote from Founding Father John Adams regarding debt, that is not, in fact, something that Adams has ever actually been recorded saying. And while Reed failed in his fourth attempt at getting elected to Congress in 2018. We don’t know when he’s finally going to take a hint.



On this date in both 2018, as well as 2019, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profiled Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who prior to winning that office in the 2014 elections, was a member of the Texas state legislature for over a decade. And while there’s no shortage of Texas Republicans for CSGOPOTD to have profiled through the past few years, Ken Paxton earned our notice not just for the usual Fundamentalism you see from members of the Lone Star State GOP, but for the fact that while he was tasked with enforcing the law in Texas, he was simultaneously fighting an extended legal battle while being accused of committing securities fraud.

But that’s really not all, as Paxton’s alleged illegal activity and all his chicanery to avoid ever going to go to trial for it until after the 2018 elections, if at all, (the indictments for white collar crime are almost three years old now) have cost a small fortune in legal fees. Legal fees which were paid for by campaign donors of Paxton, so he’s had to report “gifts” he’s received totaling over $84,000 to keep himself out of court. Again, this is the guy responsible with the law being enforced in Texas. Although, his interest in what the law actually is seems hyper-focused on partisan politics, as Paxton has encouraged state officials to ignore the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges ruling, chastised school districts for respecting the gender identity of students trying to use the bathroom, and just two months ago, Paxton sent a “cease and desist” letter to Texas public schools for busing students eligible to vote to the polls, which has been encouraged previously in Texas since the Civil Rights movement passed over half a century ago. It seems Paxton is terrified of the thought of young people having access to our democracy.

But Paxton is threatened by a great many things, and will flat out make things up to feign outrage over, like the time he accused a Texas school district of creating a “Muslim-only prayer room”, which was in no way a part of reality. Or it could be just that Ken doesn’t see that well out of his droopy eye, or something.

Maybe none of this should come as much of a surprise, because when you look at Paxton’s career in the Texas state legislature, there were signs he was a fanatic, like when he co-sponsored HB 3678, a bill aimed at allowing students greater expression of their religious beliefs in public schools, like say, when a teacher dared to mention that evolution is a thing. He also co-sponsored SB 14, a bill to suppress the vote in Texas via stricter Voter ID laws, voted for bills that attempted to nullify federal firearm regulations, co-sponsored legislation that would enact the failure of a conservative policy of drug testing welfare recipients, voted against HB 950, which would have guaranteed equal pay for women in Texas, and was a co-sponsor ofTexas’ HB 2 law, which was aimed at closing down all the abortion clinics in the state by creating stricter requirements for them.

In spite of all the indictments that have held against him for years now, as well as his long track record of extremist lunacy, Ken Paxton decided not to bow out of the 2018 elections, and only narrowly won re-election, barely cracking the 50% threshhold. His trial for securities fraud has yet to begin, and his wife, Angela Paxton, is now a Texas State Senator trying to draft legislation that would exempt her husband from facing jail time for the crimes he’s committed (really). He has taken his second term in office to do such effective things such as launch an investigation into the city of San Antonio for refusing to open a Chik-Fil-A in their airport because of the company’s history of anti-LGBTQ activities, because Paxton feels they may have rejected the chicken franchise due to “religious discrimination”. (Remember Texas, he’s spending taxpayer dollars on that investigation.)

And, ever so slowly, the trial date approaches for Ken Paxton, and yet he’s still not resigned, using his office during one of the more pressing times in American history in some of the most corrupt and bizarre ways. Like how Paxton intervened on behalf of one of his political donors out of state in Colorado to try and get them an exception against a “stay out” order for non-residents of a resort community during the Covid-19 outbreak. Or how he’s been trying to fight against calls to vote by mail during the pandemic to prevent the spread of the virus and getting more people infected. He’s aligned so much with the Texas GOP’s insistence on “reopening the economy” that he paid the fines of a Dallas salon owner who ignored orders to keep her business shuttered during the outbreak. Shows he's real ready to defend the law when he pays people to defy it.

At this point, we’re counting down the hours before Paxton’s trial and hoping he’s forced out of office as a result, because he seems to put more energy into putting his constituents at risk than keeping them safe.

[worstblogever]

In both 2015, and in 2016, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” published profiles of Jim Buchy, a rather controversial member of the Ohio House of Representatives who served 9 terms from 1983-2000, and then after a decade out of office, was the hand-picked appointment of Gov. John Kasich to replace Jim Zehringer in his position in 2010. Buchy has continued running for office every two years since, putting his total number of terms in office to 12 over the past 34 years. Since beginning his second run in the Ohio state legislature, he has been criticized for making Birther jokes abortion in Ohio unless a mother's life is at risk, as well as a repeatedly pushing for a fetal heartbeat abortion ban that would place the ban on the procedure at 6 weeks (in other words, unconstitutional via Roe v. Wade). Buchy has also pushed for curtailing voting rights, voted to allow school employees to carry firearms on campus in that time, supported legislation to try and stop Syrian refugees from being resettled in his state, and supported "religious freedom" legislation. He thankfully has chosen to not run for re-election in 2016, and being that he is in his late seventies now, it looks like he's done in politics.

On this date in 2017, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” posted a profile of Rick Womick, a former Republican member of the Tennessee House of Representatives from 2010 to 2016. The Volunteer State has no shortage of GOP extremists, but Womick in particular, took it to a new level on various occasions, perhaps no more noteworthy than the time he reacted to the news that Gov. Bill Haslam would follow the Supreme Court's Obergefell v. Hodges ruling by suddenly calling for his party's own governor to be impeached. Womick's not at all hyperbolic statement went as follows, “And where is Tennessee’s leadership…oh that’s right…our Governor bowed down to the five self appointed gods in black robes just minutes after they issued their ‘opinion! He changed Tennessee state law and our State Constitution without ever consulting with the General Assembly.” Besides that huge civics class fail from Womick, only a year prior he declared Haslam a "traitor to our party" over what he called efforts by a political-action committee run by supporters to defeat opponents of Common Core education standards. Now, the end of Rick Womick's political career may have come from him lashing out repeatedly at his own governor, but maybe the Tennessee GOP should have realized he was unstable prior to that. Back on Veteran's Day in 2011, he figured it was a good time to call for all Muslims to be kicked out of the U.S. Military, because as he opined in a paranoid rant, “if they truly are a devout Muslims, and follow the Quran and the Sunnah, then I feel threatened because they’re commanded to kill me.” He then went on to further stoke Islamophobic hatred by declaring Allah is a "false God", and claiming that he had now ensured there was a "fatwa on my head". It further devolved from there into conspiracy theory territory where he said Iran had planned a "population Jihad" where they would take over the United States by pushing for Muslim immigrants to head here from all over the Middle East, and that had been their plan since the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Only four month later, in March of 2012, Rick Womick was ranting about a whole other conspiracy theory, this time the threat of the United Nations' Agenda 21, which were no longer a bunch of environmental recommendations to be adopted, but instead, a sinister plot for global domination and to, as Womick explained, "a step by step methodical process that denies United States citizens their property rights". Somehow, even after all that, Womick got re-elected to a second term in office. And in it, he started things off by once claiming in a hearing that the city of Shelbyville, Tennessee, was the victim of a "electromagnetic pulse bomb" detonated by unnamed terrorists for uncertain reasons. Now, the idea that the "terrorists" targeted the Tennessee state legislators is weird (you'd think using it in a major metropolitan area, if it existed, would cause more chaos), but nobody else seemed to know what the hell Womick was talking about but he insisted it was "in the paper". We don't really feel the need to get too much farther into this head case, but will note his voting record features support for all of the kookiest ideas to come out of the Tennessee state legislature from its past three sessions. Whether it's trying to restrict abortion or voting rights, nullify the Affordable Care Act, teach Creationism in schools, making the Bible the state book, allow guns in schools, or preserve the names of Confederate monuments... it makes us glad that Womick’s career has come to an end.

[PaulBullion]

I mean, they didn't call Obama the deporter in chief for nothing, right? Did the GOP force him to do that too?

Who were "they" though?

[worstblogever]

It was on this date in both 2018, as well as 2019, that “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profiled the sitting member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Ohio’s 6th District, Bill Johnson, who was first elected in… wait for it… the 2010 Tea Party Wave. He’s managed to win four more elections, which has a lot to do with the fact that Ohio’s 6th has a +16 lean in Congress. He’s usually not known for awkward quotes, and he has the benefit of providing absolutely no name recognition. Honestly, is there anything more generic of a name for a Congressman than BILL JOHNSON? That stands out as much as it would if he was one of the townspeople named Johnson in Blazing Saddles.

We give some points on the dumb scale to Johnson for denying climate change science. But it’s not just that he waves away the facts, it’s that he claims he’s an expert because he says he is a “scientist” himself. For the record, Bill Johnson’s “science background” is a degree in computer science… that was awarded to him back in 1979, quite the golden age for high level technology. And it was that resume that Johnson used to stifle an actual scientist from the EPA in a Congressional hearing.

What concerns us more, though, is the level of Islamophobia that seems to have taken root in Rep. Johnson over the past few years. You might wonder why the guy would support Donald Trump’s bigoted idea of a Muslim travel ban, but then you realize, Trump is hardly the only bigot who he’s palling around with these days. Johnson has been identified as one of two GOP members of Congress allying himself with Daniel Pipes, an anti-Muslim activist who has for decades been maligning practitioners of Islam, and after the Oklahoma City Bombing, insisted it was carried out by Muslims, and not anti-government militia goons Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. Bill Johnson and Ron DeSantis both co-founded the “Congressional Israel Victory Caucus”, which advises extreme action to help Israel wipe out Palestine, including withholding water from Palestinian settlers. Delightful. Don’t see how that could be a reason that peace won’t be brought to the MidEast, y’know, trying to get people on one side to die of thirst.

During Johnson’s first eight years in office, he wasted years of taxpayer time trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, twice voted to defund Planned Parenthood, voted against Disaster Relief Funding for victims of Hurricane Sandy, voted against the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act, voted to shut down the government in 2013, and in 2018, when his party controlled both chambers of Congress and the White House, and voted for the GOP’s $1.7 trillion tax cut to benefit the wealthiest Americans and corporations permanently that coincidentally also removes the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate and kicks 13 million people off their health insurance.

Bill Johnson coasted to re-election with 69% of the vote in 2018, and has resumed being a partisan bag of d***s:

• January 23rd, 2019: Rep. Johnson voted against HR 648, because he was gleefully enjoying the longest government shutdown in history.
• February 28th, 2019: Bill Johnson votes against HR 1112, a bill which would have required universal background checks on all firearm purchases, and close the gun show loophole.
• March 14th, 2019: Rep. Johnson votes against HJR 46, which sane members of Congress voted for to reject Donald Trump’s “national emergency” regarding the U.S. border and his attempts to reallocate funds for a border wall without Congressional approval.
• April 4th, 2019: Bill Johnson is one of 158 Republicans who choose to vote against the re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act, likely because they feel the 2nd Amendment remaining absolute is more important than preventing people with a history of domestic abuse from owning a firearm (which statistics show, makes them more likely to use those firearms against women in their lives).
• May 17th, 2019: Johnson can’t be bothered to show up to vote on The Equality Act, which would have prevented discrimination towards Americans based on their gender identity or sexual orientation.
• June 4th, 2019: Rep. Johnson votes against the Dreamers Act, because he’s too xenophobic and partisan to care about immigration reform.
• July 16th, 2019: Bill Johnson votes against a resolution to condemn Donald Trump for his racist statements that four people of color in Congress should “go back where they came from”.
• October 23rd, 2019: Johnson is one of 41 Republicans who, while staring down the possibility of Donald Trump being impeached, stage a ridiculous publicity stunt in response by crashing a classified impeachment inquiry hearing for a “protest”.
• December 18th, 2019: Rep. Johnson ignores his Congressional duty to hold a president who has been proven to commit high crimes and misdemeanors accountable and votes against the impeachment of Donald Trump.

Bill Johnson is currently chaining himself to the legacy of Donald Trump, responding to the Mueller report back on April 18th, 2019, by saying it revealed, “no collusion, no obstruction, no anything”, in spite of all the times that Robert Mueller’s report mentioned things Trump did that qualify as obstruction of justice, all of the hundreds of links between the Trump campaign and Russian oligarchs, and the nameless criminal activities that he forwarded to other prosecutors.

The day of the impeachment vote, Bill Johnson mocked the proceedings by calling for a “moment of silence” for the 63 million voters who voted for Trump and were having their voices ignored by the impeachment. In case you’re wondering, no, he hasn’t called for any moments of silence as of this posting, almost a hundred thousand victims of Covid-19 die because of the incompetence of the same president Johnson bent over backwards to try and keep in power.

We can only hope that in 2020, the people of Ohio’s 6th remember that Johnson and his party put a criminal and traitor above the security of the American people, and undo the mistake they’ve made for a decade.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Who were "they" though?

Mostly the haters and detractors.

[aja_christopher]

The Republican party is blatantly corrupt -- the criminals need to be prosecuted and their enablers need to be voted out of power.

They also need to remember that citizens who are unable to find justice through democracy will seek it via other measures.

Demographics alone ensure their inevitable reckoning in due time.

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"Supreme Court blocks House from Mueller grand jury material"

"The Supreme Court on Wednesday temporarily prevented the House of Representatives from obtaining secret grand jury testimony from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

The court’s unsigned order granted the Trump administration’s request to keep previously undisclosed details from the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election out of the hands of Democratic lawmakers, at least until early summer. The court will decide then whether to extend its hold and schedule the case for arguments in the fall. If it does, it’s likely the administration will be able to put off the release of any materials until after Election Day.

Arguments themselves might not even take place before Americans decide whether to give President Donald Trump a second term.

For justices eager to avoid a definitive ruling, the delay could mean never having to decide the case, if either Trump loses or Republicans regain control of the House next year. It’s hard to imagine the Biden administration would object to turning over the Mueller documents or House Republicans would continue to press for them.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi objected to the high court’s decision in a statement Wednesday evening. “The House’s long-standing right to obtain grand jury information pursuant to the House’s impeachment power has now been upheld by the lower courts twice,” Pelosi said. “These rulings are supported by decades of precedent and should be permitted to proceed.”

The federal appeals court in Washington ruled in March that the documents should be turned over because the House Judiciary Committee’s need for the material in its investigation of Trump outweighed the Justice Department’s interests in keeping the testimony secret. Mueller’s 448-page report, issued in April 2019, “stopped short” of reaching conclusions about Trump’s conduct, including whether he obstructed justice, to avoid stepping on the House’s impeachment power, the appeals court said.

The committee was able to persuasively argue that it needed access to the underlying grand jury material to make its own determinations about the president’s actions, the court said. The materials initially were sought last summer, but by the time the appeals court ruled in March, Trump had been impeached by the House and acquitted by the Senate.

The Justice Department said in its Supreme Court filings that the court’s action was needed in part because the House hasn’t given any indication it “urgently needs these materials for any ongoing impeachment investigation.”

The House had opposed the delay on the grounds that its investigation of Trump was continuing, and that time is of the essence because of the approaching election. The current session of the House will end Jan. 3, and lawmakers elected in November will take their seats.

The committee investigation “continues today and has further developed in light of recent events,” the House told the justices, citing the “possible exercise of improper political influence” on decisions to seek a shorter prison term for Trump confidant Roger Stone and end the prosecution of former national security adviser Michael Flynn, despite his two guilty pleas.

Pelosi said Wednesday: “The Justice Department’s continued delay is part of a pattern of the Administration hiding the truth from the public. The American people deserve the truth."

https://apnews.com/f6a44e351dc425796c3a6bf7a711ce7c

[aja_christopher]

"The Republican Party Is Losing Its Future"

Representative Will Hurd’s retirement leaves the party with just one black member of Congress.

"You can pick your own favorite data point. “There are 277 Republican governors, senators and congresspeople. Without Hurd, exactly one (1) is black,” Dan Lavoie calculates. Or as Politico notes, “There are more men named Jim in the House than Republican women running for reelection.”

But the point is clear. With Representative Will Hurd’s announcement last night that he won’t run for reelection, it seems as if there’s no room for anyone but white men in the Republican Party.

The GOP’s stats were miserable even before the past few weeks, which have seen retirement announcements from several Republicans, including Representative Martha Roby of Alabama, one of 13 women in the House GOP caucus. Representative Susan Brooks, another one of them and the head of recruitment for the caucus, has also opted not to run.

The Hurd departure hurts more than most. Hurd just won an extremely tough reelection race in his Texas district; his retirement means that Democrats might be able to build on their slow return in the Lone Star State. But Hurd is more than a number. A charismatic young politician, an African American, and a former CIA officer, he has won respect from Democrats and was an emerging leader on national-security issues. In 2017, he even went on a widely publicized road trip from Texas to Washington, D.C., with then-Representative Beto O’Rourke.

Hurd was labeled a rising star—the future of the Republican Party, even. “I’ve been involved in Republican politics for over 30 years, and Democrats should be worried about Will Hurd,” Texas GOP Chair Tom Mechler told Tim Alberta. “The sky is the limit. This guy is incredible.” And now Hurd is retiring. Though he said he plans to run for office again, he’s not running for anything at the moment. The future is already slipping away.

It’s probably not a coincidence that Hurd’s announcement came after weeks of Donald Trump lambasting minority members of the House of Representatives. There’s practically no room for criticism of President Trump in the Republican Party, but it’s also untenable for African American Republicans such as Hurd to stand by silently while Trump makes these remarks.

Hurd has previously proved willing to break with Trump, criticizing his border-wall plan and repeatedly warning about Russian election interference. Unlike Representative Justin Amash, though, Hurd has been unwilling to make that the prime thing he is known for. But in an interview with The Washington Post yesterday, Hurd criticized Trump for his recent comments.

“When you imply that because someone doesn’t look like you, in telling them to go back to Africa or wherever, you’re implying that they’re not an American and you’re implying that they have less worth than you,” he said.

Unlike Amash, who recently announced that he was leaving the GOP, Hurd says he’ll still vote for Trump if he’s the Republican nominee. But like Amash, his decision not to run again means he will be leaving the House Republican caucus.

Of course, a heavily white male group of elected Republicans isn’t new. Until the election of Tim Scott to the House in 2010, the GOP hadn’t had a single black senator or congressman since J. C. Watts retired in 2003. (Scott is now a senator.) Since the 1964 election, the party has often relied on racism, sometimes veiled and sometimes less so, to turn out supporters. Unsurprisingly, that hasn’t helped it win minority votes.

But not long ago, the Republican Party appeared to have an epiphany — of self-interest if not quite moral enlightenment. The election of Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president, showed the power of minority votes — and raised the specter that demographic change, as the nation became less white, would create a Democratic electoral edge for the foreseeable future. The GOP redoubled its efforts to ensure that the party was running more women and more minorities for office. That reflected the idea that “it’s hard to be what you can’t see.” These efforts sometimes carried a whiff of tokenism, but if Republicans wanted to attract a more diverse array of voters, they had to show those voters that people like them were in the party.

...instead, the Republican Party is now the party of Trump. The center of his platform was a racially infused rage about immigration, which threatened to alienate the Hispanic voters the autopsy declared the GOP needed. His long record of racist actions and remarks, and his habit of speaking about minorities as an undifferentiated “other,” did the same for other groups. His crass remarks about women, allegations of sexual misconduct, and a tape in which he boasts about sexually assaulting a woman hurt the party with female voters. Now he has signaled that he’ll place racial division at the heart of his reelection campaign.

The problem here is the Republican Party, not conservatism. As Eugene Scott points out, there’s a more ideological diversity among African American voters than is often acknowledged. But Trump’s behavior and actions are reversing any progress that the party might have made with minorities, and then some.

Trump and his allies keep insisting that he is not a sexist or a racist, but one of the more potent rejoinders comes from female and minority members of his own party, who have made clear by their actions that they don’t feel there’s a place for them in the party he leads.

Meanwhile, the demographic pressures that informed the autopsy haven’t gone away. Trump showed there was still a way to put together a winning electoral coalition with white voters, but that grows harder each year. “When you look at trends, the two largest growing groups of voters are Latinos and young people. And we know what the broader trends are happening there,” Hurd has said of Texas—and the same is true nationwide.

“I think I have an opportunity to help make sure the Republican Party looks like America,” Hurd told the Post about his postretirement plans.

The fact that he thinks he’ll be in a better position to do that as a nonelected official speaks bluntly about the state of the party — and the odds that he’ll succeed."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...-party/595369/

[WestPhillyPunisher]

A predictably shitty move by SCOTUS which has become blatantly partisan. I'm no political animal, but I can't imagine the Supremes doing that for Dubya, Bush Senior or even Saint Ronnie Reagan. Pardon my ignorance, but what the hell is it about Trump that's made politicians and judges on the right collectively lose their fucking minds?

[aja_christopher]

A predictably shitty move by SCOTUS which has become blatantly partisan. I'm no political animal, but I can't imagine the Supremes doing that for Dubya, Bush Senior or even Saint Ronnie Reagan. Pardon my ignorance, but what the hell is it about Trump that's made politicians and judges on the right collectively lose their fucking minds?

Might be easier to ask what was it about Obama that did so since Trump rode the "birther controversy" to total control over said party.



Republicans have been like this for decades -- Trump just pulled the hood off.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Might be easier to ask what was it about Obama that did so since Trump rode the "birther controversy" to total control over said party.

Well, we all know the answer to that question....he was black.

[aja_christopher]

Well, we all know the answer to that question....he was black.

Not just black but also a "non-American" Kenyan and Muslim.



Trump is also the child of an immigrant -- but there's a key difference that many Republicans find far more acceptable in his background.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Trump has ‘legal’ and ‘moral responsibility’ to wear mask on Ford plant tour, Michigan attorney general says

Ahead of President Trump’s planned trip Thursday to a Ford manufacturing plant in Michigan, the state’s attorney general implored him to wear a face mask on his tour, citing a “legal responsibility.”

In an open letter addressed to Trump, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel (D) asked the president, who has consistently appeared barefaced in public and at the White House, to adhere to executive orders issued by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) and Ford’s policy mandating masks to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus. Trump is scheduled to visit a factory southwest of Detroit that has been repurposed to manufacture ventilators.

“While my Department will not act to prevent you from touring Ford’s plant, I ask that while you are on tour you respect the great efforts of the men and women at Ford — and across this State — by wearing a facial covering,” Nessel wrote. “It is not just the policy of Ford, by virtue of the Governor’s Executive Orders. It is currently the law of this State."

Expecting morality out of Trump is foolishness on steroids. The joke is that Trump won't wear a mask because he's afraid his orange makeup will rub off on it, and that's probably not far from true. In any event, his indifference towards people in general will keep Trump from doing the right thing, mainly because he doesn't feel he has to.