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

[worstblogever]

In honor of Republican vote tampering, I propose we all commit 'viewer fraud' and stream the Biden town hall on multiple devices while watching it on live TV as well.

Prolly useless, I'm sure, but it'll feel satisfying...

I knew there was a reason I liked you. I mean, there's a lot of them, but this is peak.

[zinderel]

I knew there was a reason I liked you. I mean, there's a lot of them, but this is peak.

Awww! *blush*

I know I can be grating at times, but it's always nice to hear that I'm not alienating everyone. Lol.

That said, I have two tablets, a phone, and a laptop I'm gonna commit to this...

[godisawesome]

The way I see the town-hall thing working out in an ideal situation:

- Biden’s town hall goes considerably better than Trump’s and his empathy and humanity are shown again, while Trump screams and rants before a crowd for millionth time.

- Biden’s town hall beats Trump’s in ratings, possibly out of sheer spiteful ness towards Trump when some GOP idiot mentions that as a way Trump can “win” a debate.

- Trump throws another hiss fit.

- SNL has the perfect excuse to use both Baldwin and Carey in a long sketch, and the remote control shows up again.

[skyvolt2000]

It has never been a viable option and Trumps administration knows that. It’s just a convenient excuse to continue with their original strategy of sacrificing the weakest and most vulnerable in our society to ensure the economy remains stable going into the election.

https://thehill.com/homenews/adminis...mpression=true

First lady Melania Trump revealed Wednesday that her only son with President Trump, Barron Trump, tested positive for the novel coronavirus after the first couple was diagnosed but said he experienced no symptoms and has since tested negative.

The first lady said she has also tested negative since her diagnosis and hopes to resume her duties as soon as possible, according to a statement posted to the White House website.

Should we ask them their opinion now????

[BeastieRunner]

With Trump about to have a huge SCOTUS majority, could they potentially protect his tax returns even if he loses the election? Would that be his “get out of jail” card?

He’ll obviously complain nonstop and never admit that he lost the election but he’s also banking on the SCOTUS to protect him after he’s out of office.

They have to rule before a new SCOTUS is sworn in. At best, he gets a tie and the lower court ruling stands and his taxes are out.

The way I see the town-hall thing working out in an ideal situation:

- Biden’s town hall goes considerably better than Trump’s and his empathy and humanity are shown again, while Trump screams and rants before a crowd for millionth time.

- Biden’s town hall beats Trump’s in ratings, possibly out of sheer spiteful ness towards Trump when some GOP idiot mentions that as a way Trump can “win” a debate.

- Trump throws another hiss fit.

- SNL has the perfect excuse to use both Baldwin and Carey in a long sketch, and the remote control shows up again.

Only if it ends with (actual) Obama having the remote and turning the TV off to say, "Enough of that. Now please go out and vote for Vice President Biden. And another thing, LIVE FROM NEW YORK ..."

[BeastieRunner]

Active KKK and voting intimidation currently happening in Tennessee.

https://www.charlotteobserver.com/ne...46428150.html/'
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-b1014048.html

They are back, thanks to 45 and the GOP.

[Mister Mets]

And here is Lindsay Graham letting the mask slip:




But don't worry, he was tooooootally sarcastic!

It is clearly and unambiguously meant to be sarcastic. Anyone who thinks otherwise has a warped understanding of modern politics.

[Mister Mets]

I realize I display a glaring lack of knowledge when it comes to politics, but aren’t tax cuts to billionaires considered handouts?

Not quite.

The main argument is that a tax cut is not the government giving money to you, but the government taking less from you.

That said, many billionaires have benefitted from sweetheart deals.

And killing people permanently removes people from the economy and they don't get to tax them. IT also costs more money in the long run when somebody dies.

GOP logic is very stupid. Even when you apply what I did in my example, money is everything, it makes no sense.

The logic here would be reprehensible, but since Covid disproportionately affects older Americans, who are more likely to be retired and using more resources than they produce, it could save money. This is part of why we shouldn't view money as everything.

The irony of a Republican telling us what's in "bad faith" about nominating this justice on hypocrisy and made-up rules should escape no one on this forum.

Only the irony, though. No one should take the idea that it actually is a bad faith argument seriously. Because it's a slip about WHO SHE IS.

This is an ad hominem that doesn't defend Senator Hirono's comments, or address the idea that the phrase "sexual preference" was very recently used without criticism by The Advocate.

I am willing to vote against members of my party when I think they're wrong, and criticize them as well. I would say that is a morally superior position to anyone who would not do the same with members of their political party.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

The way I see the town-hall thing working out in an ideal situation:

- Biden’s town hall goes considerably better than Trump’s and his empathy and humanity are shown again, while Trump screams and rants before a crowd for millionth time.

- Biden’s town hall beats Trump’s in ratings, possibly out of sheer spiteful ness towards Trump when some GOP idiot mentions that as a way Trump can “win” a debate.

- Trump throws another hiss fit.

- SNL has the perfect excuse to use both Baldwin and Carey in a long sketch, and the remote control shows up again.

If Biden REALLY wanted to spite Trump, he’d arrange for his town hall to start thirty minutes LATER, with no advance warning, that way, Joe would have the last word. That would drive Dolt45 berserk.

[skyvolt2000]

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/pol...edium=referral

More than a million Texans have already cast ballots after just the first day of early voting, and the state isn’t even finished counting the first day’s numbers.

Record breaking early voting, combined with an unusually high number of mail-in ballot returns show Texas has already surpassed 1.1 million votes with three more weeks of voting still to come.

[Celgress]

Hi all, I trust you are doing fine?

FYI I gave up following politics, and I've never been happier.

I'm just saying hello, so carry on.

[Wildling]

And here is Lindsay Graham letting the mask slip:




But don't worry, he was tooooootally sarcastic!

Proud boy GOPpers just willing to be Jokering around during a Trump administration.

Is opposing disgusting conservatism the new square for them?

[Kirby101]

For evil to prevail it only takes good men to do nothing.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2014, 2015, 2016, as well as 2017, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" published profiles of Arizona Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, who every few years gets bold enough to try and run for Congress in Arizona’s 1st Congressional District. His Back in 2012, his aspirations for higher office were cut short during the GOP Primary when the anti-immigrant sheriff was outed as gay by an ex-lover (pictured above) who also happened to be an illegal immigrant who Babeu tried to intimidate into keeping their love affair clandestine by threatening to deport him if he went to the media. And that's not even the ONLY scandal Babeu's got in his history. Remember when anti-immigrant candidate Adam Kwasman was running for Congress in 2014, and turned up to yell at a bus full of children (and it wasn't even the bus filled with migrant children)? Sheriff Paul Babeu's the guy who tipped Kwasman and a mob of xenophobes off to show up to throw rocks and scream at a bunch of kids. And yet, there's more... Babeu was once a headmaster at the DeSisto School, a boarding school, from 1999-2001. While he was there, the school was repeatedly investigated for child abuse cases including forced strip searches and forcing the kids into group showers, and per Babeu's own sister Lucy, Paul once took a 17-year old student home to be his live-in boyfriend and Babeu’s sister even shared a home movie from Christmas of 1999 with the media, where Babeu proudly boasts of the abusive brand of disclipline he used on the troubled youths in his care, including facing them into corners for days or weeks at a time, justifying it because the kids were, in his mind, "bonkers". And so, Paul Babeu lost his bid for Congress, getting only 43% of the vote against Democrat Tom O’Halleran in the 2016 elections. He has not resurfaced in politics since.

On this date in 2018, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" published a profile on McKenzie Levie aka Levi Athon aka Leviathan, a full-on White Nationalist lunatic who puts on a full suit of chain mail, and sometimes brandishes a melee weapon while going toe-to-toe with people protesting the Trump administration, and he announced a run for Congress in 2018 to challenge Rep. Marcy Kaptur for the right to represent Ohio’s 9th Congressional District. Both the Society for Creative Anachronism and Renaissance Faire community have booted Levie from their ranks. Levie is a creative anachronist, failed actor, and sword-fighting instructor who runs a Historic European Martial Arts club on Sundays in Lakewood Park, Ohio. He is also McKenzie Levie (or Mac Levi) — though he claims to “have gone by many other names”, and has told people he is out to “protect the city from people of Islam”, but he often settles for attacking people who he says are “Antifa” and his grudge with them started when protesters supposedly interrupted a wedding he was at in 2016, protesters who he insists are “funded by George Soros”. Reports have been placed by protesters that Levie has run up to them and stolen or destroyed signs at events as threatening as the March for Science, or that he has used homophobic slurs or made "suggestive comments" to a group of minors at May Day. At Pride in Cleveland, Levie was said to have stolen signs and stomped on them. What we’re getting at here is, half the time, Levie acts like a crusader wandering around the modern day ready to battle on the behalf of Christendom, and the other half, he’s just an alt-right lunatic. Make no mistake, he is geared more towards the 21st century, trying to establish a presence on social media and Youtube to support his infamy. Cleveland police keep getting called wherever Levi shows up, whether it is from his own behavior, or people who go with the “Punch a Nazi” philosophy of putting knuckles to his face. Still, Levie likes to parkour away while shouting threats that he’ll be back like a cartoon villain, because of course he does. Anyway, it seems that Ohio’s 9th Congressional District isn’t the right environment for an extremist maniac who looks like he missed the bus to Charlottesville like McKenzie Levi to win office, or for that matter, even find enough signatures to qualify for the ballot, because he didn’t turn up on it by the time the primary rolled around. Odds are decent he’ll be in prison and/or getting mental health evaluations by the time the 2020 elections roll around, and we’re hoping that his political ambitions come to an end.

On this date in 2019, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profiled Foster Friess, a long time conservative donor worth in the range of half a billion to a billion dollars who, after years of doing things like propping up candidates like Rick Santorum and investing $3 million dollars so Tucker Carlson could start his own Daily Caller news site to promote white nationalism… for whatever reason, decided to forgo donating money to Republican candidates in 2018, and make a run at Governor of Wyoming himself. We should note, though, that Friess throwing his own hat into the ring was problematic, because he had previously made troubling public statements, including an interview with Andrea Mitchell where he stated the only form of contraception he believed in as follows: ”On this contraceptive thing, my Gosh it’s such inexpensive. You know, back in my days, they used Bayer aspirin for contraception. The gals put it between their knees, and it wasn’t that costly.” That wasn’t all. He also would posit that there were Jihadist training camps in LATIN AMERICA, non-sequitir. Well, if there was any doubt that Friess had some fringe views that should disqualify him from being the Governor of Wyoming, he opened his campaign luncheon with a speech full of Birther conspiracy nonsense where he accused President Obama of “funneling money to his cousins in Zoowanatou” (a place that doesn’t exist). Foster Friess ended up losing in the GOP Primary for Governor of Wyoming with only 26% of the vote, trailing the eventual winner, Gov. Mark Gordon, by 9,000 votes. He may or may not resurface to take a crack at Wyoming’s seat in the U.S. House, or one of its U.S. Senate seats… but at the very least, he’s going to dump cash towards the biggest lunatics the GOP has on the ballot. As he is unlikely to ever reach elected office, we will set aside his profile at this time, and take a look at another wacky Republican today instead. (Current crazy/stupid scoreboard, is now 926-45, since this was established in July 2014.

[worstblogever]

Barry Moore
Welcome to what is the 926th original profile here at “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day”, where we’ll be discussing Barry Moore, an Alabama State Legislator who has represented District 91 of that body since first winning office in… you guessed it, the 2010 Tea Party Wave. He left office in 2018 in a failed attempt to get elected to Congress where he lost in the GOP Primary, but he took a second crack at winning the seat for Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District in 2020 after finding out sitting Congresswoman Martha Roby was retiring. And he won the GOP primary this year in an extremely conservative-leaning seat, meaning he’s likely to coast into a seat in Washington, DC. We’ll explain why this is a terrible thing now.

First thing’s first… Barry Moore’s voting record as an Alabama state legislator is pretty extreme, even for an Alabama Republican:

• March 22nd, 2011: Moore votes for HB 19, a stricter Voter ID bill aimed at suppressing the vote in Alabama under the guise that it combated statistically non-existent “voter fraud”.
• June 2nd, 2011: Barry Moore co-sponsors and votes for HB 56, an anti-immigration bill so harsh and poorly thought out that it cost Alabama’s state economy $11 billion dollars and about 140,000 jobs.
• June 9th, 2011: Moore votes for HB 18, a ban on abortion in Alabama at 20 weeks.
• February 20th, 2014: Barry Moore votes for HB 45, a bill that has repeatedly been deemed unconstitutional whenever of a version of it appears, to place Ten Commandments monuments on state property.
• March 4th, 2014: Moore votes for HB 490, a fetal heartbeat abortion ban that would effectively ban abortion at 6 weeks, before many women even realize they are pregnant.
• April 3rd, 2014: Barry Moore votes for SB 63, which would allow for the unconstitutional (by way of the 4th Amendment) practice of drug testing welfare recipients.
• March 11th, 2015: Moore votes for HB 18, a bill that would allow for the return of the electric chair is a barbaric means of execution.
• February 17th, 2016: Barry Moore votes for HB 45, a bill aimed a banning fetal tissue being used or sold for research.
• March 16th, 2017: Moore votes for HB 24, to allow adoption agencies to deny gay couples from adoption children based on their “religious principles”.
• April 25th, 2017: Barry Moore is so warped on the issue of reproductive rights that he voted against HB 315, a bill to allow midwives as a legal profession in Alabama.
• May 18th, 2017: Moore votes for SB 187, which would reduce the time a death row inmate has to file an appeal, and be at the mercy of the electric chair that Moore voted to return to faster.
• May 19th, 2017: Moore votes for SB 60, a bill that would prohibit the alteration or removal of “historic” markers (in layman’s terms, the ones that honor the Confederacy, specifically).

Barry Moore also believes in no restrictions on the 2nd Amendment, whatsoever, and supports the vanity project/quaqmire/dumbass idea that is Donald Trump’s wall along the U.S./Mexico border.

However, it’s not any matter of policy that makes Barry Moore a terrible candidate for Congress in 2020 (or any other year he might run). Our concerns start with his arrest on felony perjury charges back in April of 2014, when he allegedly provided false statements relating to an economic development deal in the Wiregrass area and comments regarding his Republican primary opponent Josh Pipkin. On Jan. 24th, 2014, Moore was asked by Alabama’s Deputy Attorney General Matt Hart whether Mike Hubbard (who ended up convicted of six felony counts himself) threatened to impede economic incentives from the Enterprise area in order to keep Moore's primary opponent out of the race. Moore denied that was the case to Hart and added that Hubbard was attempting to get the deal done saying the deal was "in the actual company's ball park" and continued to say that financial details were still getting worked out. He later told Hart in his official statement that he "hadn't heard anything else," which according to the indictment was also a false statement. Moore told investigators that he hadn’t told his primary opponent that year, Josh Pipkin that if he were to stay out of the race then the economic development project would remain on track. Moore asserted the decision to run was purely up to Pipkin but added that he would continue to pursue the jobs deal… which, again, was allegedly a false statement he made. Now, while Mike Hubbard was convicted in this affair, Barry Moore somehow evaded a conviction, because even though there was a recording of Moore’s conversation with Pipkin… the jury decided he just had “misremembered” the details from his conversation seven months prior, where he tried leveraging his primary opponent out of the race.

This is a “What. The. F***” level of corruption, even by Alabama standards. And a telling sign of what it takes to be convicted.

Now, one would think that such a political scandal would lead to the end of a legislator’s career… but that is not the case here. Barry Moore served four more years in the state legislature, and started trying to get elected to Congress in Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District. Yes, he lost in the primary to Martha Roby in that first attempt, but he wasn’t exactly blown out. In 2020, he’s won the primary, and looks to be able to coast to victory in November, given that it has a +16 Republican lean.

Well, Barry Moore managed to stand out in the build up to the 2020 election by sharing a meme where he seemingly gave his approval of teenage murder suspect Kyle Rittenhouse (we're probably being too generous considering he killed his victims on film), who traveled from his home in Illinois to hunt people protesting the death of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin with an assault rifle. The image in question shows two people on the ground who “didn’t fight back”, and then Rittenhouse, who it credits with “fighting back”.

Well, frankly, based on Barry Moore’s headspace, we’d rather people in Alabama’s 2nd fight back with votes, and surprise us all by flipping this seat blue and electing Democratic candidate Phyllis Harvey Hall, a retired elementary school teacher who seems far more level-headed and has the composure this country really needs right now. Oh, there’s also the matter that we just discussed how Moore is a corrupt, partisan, racist tool. We could do without a fresh one of those at the capitol.