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

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Something I found on Twitter, rather appropriate, given what happened in Texas over the weekend:

[Mister Mets]

Dude...

That it ain't the entire picture does not actually change that it is a pretty accurate representation of part of the picture.

I don't disagree with that.

Says the guy on the ledge.

There is more white on white crime in the US than any other. Raw numbers. Don't see the tough on crime Rs jumping on that, do you?

The box cartoon makes it easy to ignore the cause.

Hence why I dislike it.

Raw numbers would be relevant to policy discussions about helping the most people.

As for my background, it matters a bit that I'm white. It matters more that my parents are married, have professional degrees, have no substance abuse problems, and waited before they were 25+ before having kids.

It still amazes me that anyone takes you seriously, but that seems to be analogous to the problems in this country.

Instead of getting personal, can you tell me what I said here that you disagree with?

Do you think the point on equality and equity is exclusively about race/ protected classes?

[Mister Mets]

If you're talking about COVID picking off those idiots, yeah, that's a safe bet.

Car accidents, too.

I'm not that good at debate so I'll let someone else rebut this, but can I ask a question? Why does something have to just be "good enough"? Why can't it be made better?

One argument would be opportunity costs.

While you're having this fight, it means you can't spend time and resources elsewhere.

There is also the question procedurally of how to get to it. Right now, 196 Electoral Votes worth of states have voted for the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. If we add the states where Democrats have the governorship and both state legislatures, we can add Maine's four electoral votes, and Virginia's 13 electoral votes. They're still going to fall short. They have realistic chances of flipping the Minnesota and North Carolina state legislatures. That brings them to 238 electoral votes in the best case scenario in a wave election. Time spent talking about the electoral college means there's less times to have bills ready for President Joe Biden to sign, when he may very well have a Democratic Senate on board (Democrats have only had control of the White House and both branches of Congressfor four years since 1981.)

One further problem is that the emphasis on the popular vote pushes Democratic activists and campaigners to spend time and resources into something that won't help them win. Hillary Clinton pushed out the vote in places she didn't need it, like California or New York, or places where it wouldn't help enough like New Orleans, because she wanted a popular vote mandate. It could be one of the reasons she lost.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, as well as 2019, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day posted profiles of U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a man the general public finds to have the most inexplicable desire to punch in the face upon gazing upon his visage, that after hearing him speak, makes them only wish they'd gone with that instinct. Sen. Cruz is one of the most willfully repugnant heels in the GOP these days, who revels in causing outrage among those on his left (which is practically everyone), as if it’s a form of sustenance he needs to survive day to day. Ted Cruz (a.k.a. Rafael Cruz) has not only inherited an uncanny likeness to legendary “Red Scare” perpetrator Sen. Joe McCarthy, he has also adopted his tactics, making baseless claims to demonize anyone to the left of his far, far right agenda while sneering through media interviews where he plays the victim of a “vast liberal media conspiracy” when he’s called out for being a total douchebag (Cruz actually accused the moderator of the third 2016 GOP Primary debate of liberal bias for asking him a question he didn't want to answer about the debt ceiling). It’s hard to pick any one single moment as Cruz’s potential lowest point in politics as in 2016, among his most revolting moments included when he advocated for U.S. surveillance of Muslim communities to "patrol and secure" practitioners of Islam, when he sat down for an interview with the leader of the anti-gay hate group, the Family Research Council, Tony Perkins, and spread lies about how transgender people are sexually assaulting women in public bathrooms, when he blamed Democrats for not caring enough about violence against the LGBTQ community after the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, and called a witness to testify in Congress who immediately accused two Muslim Congressmen, Keith Ellison and Andre Carson, of being secret members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Sen. Cruz was the driving force behind the 2013 Government Shutdown, and then was shocked when his GOP colleagues held him accountable for it when it quickly proved a failed endeavor. Even though opinion polls have shown that the more people who learn Ted Cruz exists, the more people polled also develop an unfavorable view of him, he decided to make a run for the White House in 2016, only avoiding being the biggest racist, sexist troll of the bunch because Donald Trump was in the mix. Ted Cruz once filibustered for 21 hours straight in Congress (which he ignorantly compared to the Bataan death march), and by “filibuster” I mean “talks ad nauseum while no other Congressional business was scheduled”. The highlight of that speech was perhaps when he misinterpreted the meaning behind the classic children’s book “Green Eggs and Ham” in regards to the Affordable Care Act, and interpreted to be about someone who was justifiably stubborn, rather than a tale of someone who should be open to new things. Without irony, he called himself a "modern day Galileo" for his brave stance in denying climate change AGAINST all science and reason, which is precisely the opposite of what Galileo did back during the Renaissance. Cruz single-handedly held up government aid to fix the lead-contaminated water system in Flint, Michigan for no particular reason except that he’s a d***.

Cruz is such a callous prick that he actually made jokes about Vice President Joe Biden while he was grieving over the loss of his son, Beau, and was not speaking publicly, and when news broke that former President Jimmy Carter was battling brain cancer, Cruz took it as a cue to bash his one term in office at the Iowa State Fair to garner Republican Primary votes. He considers the Supreme Court's rulings on same sex marriage "the very definition of tyranny". He has tried proving his manliness by placing raw bacon on the barrel of a machine gun, firing it repeatedly so it would get hot, and then eat it. Ted Cruz is a man whose honest goal is to see he U.S. Senate filled with himself and 99 other people just like his hero, legendary Senator and unapologetic segregationalist Jesse Helms. He is, in short, the most unlikable bastard in Washington, D.C. at the moment, to the extent that his own party has stalwarts like Sen. John McCain who refer to him as a “whacko bird”, a term that Cruz takes as a compliment and former House Speaker John Boehner calls Ted Cruz "Lucifer in the Flesh".

Seriously, everyone hates Ted Cruz, down to his own family, as evidenced by the above animated gif of his daughter recoiling in horror at the thought of getting a kiss from him, and the unedited, raw footage of his family awkwardly trying to come up with nice things to say about him during his presidential campaign.Before his campaign was over, he was utterly humiliated in moments like when he named a vice-presidential candidate on his ticket to help him get more support with Republican women... Carly Fiorina who proceeded to fall off the stage when she was introduced at one of his rallies.

The oddest thing about the 2016 GOP Presidential Primary was that somehow, Donald Trump proved himself to be enough of a raging ***hole that we almost... ALMOST felt bad for Ted Cruz. If there was ever a metaphor for Cruz being overshadowed by Trump, it was probably when he was literally speaking out against the sentient rancid tangerine at the RNC, and Trump's plane buzzed his speech. I mean, when he got called "Lyin' Ted", we didn't blink, because Ted Cruz is a prolific liar. But when Trump started outright clowning him and called his wife Heidi ugly, or accused Sen. Cruz's father of being an accomplice in the assassination of JFK... Well, that was brutal. And it made it easy to understand why Ted Cruz went out on the third night of the Republican National Convention, and refused to endorse Trump. It was a stance most could agree with, not just because of Trump's utter ignorance and unfitness for office... but that he personally had besmirched Cruz's loved ones. Maybe for the first time ever, people nodded in approval for Ted Cruz for being a human being for once. Cruz promised he would not endorse Trump like a "servile puppy".

But no, Ted Cruz isn't just a puppy, he's a little b**** of one, and came crawling back to endorse Donald Trump and actually phone bank for him about ten weeks later. He caved, and was broken.

He has voted for every horrible member of Trump’s “Cabinet of Horrors” as well as the GOP’s Senate attempt to try and repeal the Affordable Care Act that would have left 23 million people without health insurance and gutted funding from Medicaid.

Polling over the past several months has shown Cruz might be in serious jeopardy of losing his seat, as polls have shown Democratic candidate Beto O’Rourke is running neck and neck against him, even in supposedly bright red Texas and O’Rourke’s fundraising is triple what Cruz’s has been. Cruz spent 2017 trying to stabilize his flagging polling numbers by continuing to pal around with members of Anti-Islamic hate groups, and show up and speak at their conferences. Well, that and he was trying to raise money by, y’know, sending out fundraising letters that lie and claim Planned Parenthood is using government dollars to perform abortions and that “millions of babies are being killed in the womb”. He has championed people with views or backgrounds as revolting as Brett Kavanaugh and Alex Jones in the past few years.

He tried to smarm-splain Star Wars to Mark friggin’ Hamill, of all people, to gain credibility, getting none.

[worstblogever]

That doesn’t seem at all desperate, does it? What could be even more desperate? Well, how about seeing Ted Cruz have to seek out a 2018 campaign visit from Donald Trump, a man who still won’t take back accusing Cruz’s father of taking part in the assassination of JFK. We can’t help but laugh, but seriously, Ted Cruz can’t look cool no matter what he tries. He can’t even successfully post a Facebook Live video without f***ing it up. Beto O’Rourke ran circles around him in their 2018 debate, perhaps the saddest moment being when Sen. Cruz was stumped into silence for a full six seconds when asked to discuss something… anything that has nothing to do with politics that would give Texans an insight into who he is as a person.

Beto O’Rourke was seriously living rent free in Ted Cruz’s head, as evidenced by the photo of Cruz looking pathetic and staring at a photo of O’Rourke while sitting on a plane sure makes it look that way and then how his attempts to use photos of O’Rourke in a band in college where he wore a dress backfired, as others posted pictures of Ted Cruz in college, dressed up as a mime.vCruz has been heckled out of restaurants in Washington, D.C., because people have their limits.

After his re-election by a narrow margin to a second term in the Senate, Ted Cruz has continued to be human garbage. It wasn’t just that in June of 2019, that he came to the defense of a conservative pundit who was under fire for harassing a journalist from Vox with homophobic slurs (interesting battle you picked there, Ted)… In September of 2019, he tried arguing against gun control by blaming violence in Chicago (and getting its new mayor to tell him to cram it in his cramhole). When word came that Brett Kavanaugh had ANOTHER accusation of sexual assault leveled against him, Cruz responded that people “need to let the anger go”, as if it’s wrong to be ANGRY ABOUT A SERIAL SEXUAL PREDATOR ON THE SUPREME COURT.

But never forget that Ted Cruz is a repugnant, holier-than-thou Evangelical who will try and distract from say, the impeachment of Donald Trump, to be utterly repugnant, and refer to a 7 year old boy receiving hormone blockers to undergo gender conversion therapy as “child abuse”.

In the past year since we’ve updated our profile of Ted Cruz, we’ve watched him He's also tried lying and claiming he never met any of the Proud Boys (he met their leader, Enrique Tarrio, in 2019), screaming at CNN’s Chris Cuomo about how wrong his brother, Gov. Andrew Cuomo was for having mask mandates and shutting down businesses to save lives during the Covid-19 pandemic, spreading rumors about the non-existent "Obamagate" conspiracy theory, trying to taunt Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on science only to be called out for denying the science of evolution, and of course, the moment when he did our Senate proud by trying to arrange a wrestling match between actor Ron Perlman and Congressman Jim Jordan (really), After spending the end of 2019 spreading Russian propaganda about Hunter Biden in the hopes of getting Donald Trump re-elected, and then raging at reporters for calling him out on it. As the election approached and the narrative attacking Hunter Biden never helped Republicans gain traction, Cruz decided to, what else… pretend he never was pushing it, and blamed Donald Trump for its failure to stick.

Seriously, the Senate GOP has a full rogues gallery of motherf***ers, but Ted Cruz is somehow still perhaps the most loathsome guy in there (and that’s saying something). His most flattering quality really is that he resembles the Zodiac Killer. And this insufferable prick will be continuing to sabotage American politics and whining about somehow being the victim as long as his theocratic take on the country isn’t reality. He’ll keep that up until he’s no longer office, which right now will probably not be until he faces re-election in 2024.

And we look forward to the election night when he’s rejected, as he should have been his whole life.

[Amadeus Arkham]

Ten years ago, could anyone believe this man would one day become President?

[InformationGeek]

Almost there...

[Amadeus Arkham]

It’s going to be a crazy next few days. Brace for impact. The 2020 election series finale is almost upon us!

[Tami]

It’s going to be a crazy next few days. Brace for impact. The 2020 election series finale is almost upon us!

[JCAll]

Almost there...

Man, I don't like the reference we're using here. I remember what happened at the end of the Third Day.

[Tami]

Why Trump Can’t Afford to Lose

No American President has ever been charged with a criminal offense. But, as Donald Trump fights to hold on to the White House, he and those around him surely know that if he loses—an outcome that nobody should count on—the presumption of immunity that attends the Presidency will vanish. Given that more than a dozen investigations and civil suits involving Trump are currently under way, he could be looking at an endgame even more perilous than the one confronted by Nixon. The Presidential historian Michael Beschloss said of Trump, “If he loses, you have a situation that’s not dissimilar to that of Nixon when he resigned. Nixon spoke of the cell door clanging shut.” Trump has famously survived one impeachment, two divorces, six bankruptcies, twenty-six accusations of sexual misconduct, and an estimated four thousand lawsuits. Few people have evaded consequences more cunningly. That run of good luck may well end, perhaps brutally, if he loses to Joe Biden. Even if Trump wins, grave legal and financial threats will loom over his second term.

Two of the investigations into Trump are being led by powerful state and city law-enforcement officials in New York. Cyrus Vance, Jr., the Manhattan District Attorney, and Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, are independently pursuing potential criminal charges related to Trump’s business practices before he became President. Because their jurisdictions lie outside the federal realm, any indictments or convictions resulting from their actions would be beyond the reach of a Presidential pardon. Trump’s legal expenses alone are likely to be daunting. (By the time Bill Clinton left the White House, he’d racked up more than ten million dollars in legal fees.) And Trump’s finances are already under growing strain. During the next four years, according to a stunning recent Times report, Trump—whether reëlected or not—must meet payment deadlines for more than three hundred million dollars in loans that he has personally guaranteed; much of this debt is owed to such foreign creditors as Deutsche Bank. Unless he can refinance with the lenders, he will be on the hook. The Financial Times, meanwhile, estimates that, in all, about nine hundred million dollars’ worth of Trump’s real-estate debt will come due within the next four years. At the same time, he is locked in a dispute with the Internal Revenue Service over a deduction that he has claimed on his income-tax forms; an adverse ruling could cost him an additional hundred million dollars. To pay off such debts, the President, whose net worth is estimated by Forbes to be two and a half billion dollars, could sell some of his most valuable real-estate assets—or, as he has in the past, find ways to stiff his creditors. But, according to an analysis by the Washington Post, Trump’s properties—especially his hotels and resorts—have been hit hard by the pandemic and the fallout from his divisive political career. “It’s the office of the Presidency that’s keeping him from prison and the poorhouse,” Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale who studies authoritarianism, told me.

[Tami]

How Americans View The Coronavirus Crisis And Trump's Response

[4saken1]

For example, while a higher percentage of African-Americans in the United States are below the poverty line, the raw number of white people below the poverty line is higher.

How is this relevant to anything? Of course there are more white people below the poverty line in the this country! Their population is four and a half times higher than that of African Americans.

[Kirby101]

Man, I don't like the reference we're using here. I remember what happened at the end of the Third Day.

Maybe you will like this better.

[Tami]

Trump admin funds plasma company based in owner's condo

WASHINGTON -- When the Trump administration gave a well-connected Republican donor seed money to test a possible COVID-19-fighting blood plasma technology, it noted the company’s “manufacturing facilities” in Charleston, South Carolina.

Plasma Technologies LLC is indeed based in the stately waterfront city. But there are no manufacturing facilities. Instead, the company exists within the luxury condo of its majority owner, Eugene Zurlo.

Zurlo's company may be in line for as much as $65 million in taxpayer dollars; enough to start building an actual production plant, according to internal government records and other documents obtained by The Associated Press.

The story of how a tiny business that exists only on paper has managed to snare attention from the highest reaches of the U.S. military and government is emblematic of the Trump administration’s frenetic response to the coronavirus pandemic.

It's also another in a series of contracts awarded to people with close political ties to key officials despite concerns voiced by government scientists. Among the others: an ill-conceived $21 million study of Pepcid as a COVID therapy and more than a half billion dollars to ApiJect Systems America, a startup with an unapproved medicine injection technology and no factory to manufacture the devices.