All purpose news and politics thread part VII: News & Politics Total Landscaping

[Tami]

John Fetterman Endorses Andy Kim in High-Stakes New Jersey Senate Primary

Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania is endorsing Representative Andy Kim of New Jersey in the primary to unseat Senator Bob Menendez, the embattled veteran Democrat who is under indictment in a federal corruption case, taking the rare step of wading into a high-stakes intraparty fight to oust a colleague.

Mr. Fetterman, the harshest Democratic critic of Mr. Menendez in Congress, who has repeatedly called on him to resign, is the first sitting senator to endorse any candidate in the race. In an interview, he explained his decision to intervene in a primary to take out a fellow sitting senator, stating bluntly that “anything would be an upgrade over Menendez.”

Mr. Kim is leading by double digits in some recent polls.

In an interview, Mr. Fetterman said that he was “enthusiastic” about Mr. Kim and that Ms. Murphy’s political background — she changed her party affiliation from Republican to Democrat only in 2014 — gave him pause.

Mr. Fetterman said Ms. Murphy was likely “a lovely woman, but the last time I had to deal with a Republican from New Jersey, that was my own race.” Mr. Fetterman in 2022 defeated Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Republican nominee for Senate whom he trolled relentlessly as a celebrity carpetbagger from the Garden State.

[Deathstroke]

Prosecutors say Jan. 6 defendant, convicted of manslaughter in Iraq, poses new danger





Talk about red flags everywhere.

Or as Republicans would say..."A damn fine patriot". Gawd people suck.

[kidfresh512]

Alabama Republican: ‘Everyone has some type of racist in them’

An Alabama congressman said that he believes everyone “has some type of racist in them” during a debate in the state’s 1st Congressional District on Wednesday night.

The debate moderator asked Reps. Jerry Carl (R-Ala.) and Barry Moore (R-Ala.) if they agreed with GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley saying the U.S. has “never been a racist country” earlier this month. The two Alabama Republicans are vying to be the GOP nominee for Alabama’s 1st Congressional District after the state’s congressional maps were redrawn last year.

“Everyone has some racist in them of some type,” Carl answered. “I used to work a lot with ministers … and I had some very private conversations. Everyone has some type of racist in them. My mother through Pearl Harbor — she couldn’t stand the Japanese, she couldn’t stand it. And it used to just eat her from the inside out.”

He then went on to rail against how Alabama’s congressional maps were redrawn last year, suggesting that the maps should not be based on race. Federal judges approved a new congressional map for Alabama that maintains the state’s one Black-majority district and nearly adds a second one, which would boost Democrats’ chances for flipping a seat.

I mean Alabama so can't be too shocked. But you can tell his whole family were Klan.

[worstblogever]

Tammy Murphy’s dishonest attack on Tom Malinowski | Moran


April Fools is coming up soon, bet WBE has her on the list this year.

I think Bob Menendez is much more likely to be a lock from NJ.

[CaptainEurope]

While the DJI is near its all time high today, Tesla stock lost a MASSIVE 12% today. It's down 29% in just one month now.

Is Elon even the richest man anymore? Much of his net worth is tied up in Tesla stock.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Tammy Murphy’s dishonest attack on Tom Malinowski | Moran





April Fools is coming up soon, bet WBE has her on the list this year.

Does she give off that Casey “Tacky O” DeSantis vibe? That’s how she seems to me.

[Tami]

Does she give off that Casey “Tacky O” DeSantis vibe? That’s how she seems to me.

I do like Phil Murphy, just can't understand why hbe would support or encourage this behavior.

[AnakinFlair]

Alabama Republican: ‘Everyone has some type of racist in them’



I mean Alabama so can't be too shocked. But you can tell his whole family were Klan.

So he admits we all have a little racist in us... then immediately goes into a racist rant about how the voting districts were redrawn. Seems about right.


Pete Navaro was sentenced to 4 months in prison for Contempt of Congress.

[Kirby101]

While the DJI is near its all time high today, Tesla stock lost a MASSIVE 12% today. It's down 29% in just one month now.

Is Elon even the richest man anymore? Much of his net worth is tied up in Tesla stock.

Tesla is a grossly overpriced stock. It sells like a tech stock instead of a car company. Iy's PR is near 70, while Toyota or GM are below 10. Tesla has to grow 10x what it is now to justify it's stock price.

[worstblogever]

Well, here's a fun story just dropped by the Daily Beast:

Nancy Mace fought with her own supporters on Jan. 6th because she wanted to confront Trump supporters, get "punched in the face", and then become the new face of an anti-Trump Republican movement.

She has, of course, been trying to portray herself as the victim with a Scarlet letter more recently, but has been pretending she has always been in line with Trump, because she knows she'll lose a GOP Primary in South Carolina if she doesn't.

Absolute cowards and charlatans, the lot of the GOP.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2019, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profile the 2018 candidate for U.S. Senate from West Virginia, Don Blankenship, whose claim to fame is as a coal mining company executive who just so happened to get sentenced to a year in jail for conspiring to skirt federal laws that regulated his coal mine (specifically, the safety laws) that led to the deaths of 29 workers in a mine explosion, the deadliest accident in mining in four decades. Blankenship, a true exemplar of the GOP’s “party of responsibility” ethics blames everything on the Obama administration for putting him behind bars. Anyway, in 2018, Blankenship tried aping much of Donald Trump’s talking points, include ing the insane plan to build a border wall along the U.S./Mexico border, and calls to “Drain the Swamp”, but his flat, deadpan delivery of a rant against Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in his initial 30-second ad spot really cemented why the coal baron was not ready for politics, where he called him “Cocaine Mitch”, accused him of creating “millions of jobs for China-people and claiming that “Mitch has gotten rich. In fact, his China-family has given him tens of millions of dollars”. Don Blankenship only managed 20% of the vote in the GOP Primary for Senate in West Virginia in 2018. In 2020, he filed paperwork to run for President of the United States as the nominee for the Constitution Party, but was obviouslt not even competitive as a candidate.

On this date in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020, as well as 2021, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day”posted profiles of former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore, who is most famous for battling in the United States' culture wars since 2001, in particular his fetish for placing monuments of the Ten Commandments in government buildings. That battle led to a series of unsuccessful lawsuits, and eventually was tossed off the bench in 2003 for staunchly refusing to honor a superior federal judge's decision that the monument should be removed, as it violated the First Amendment rights of non-Christians. In 2012, for whatever reason, the people of Alabama returned him to the bench, where he's resumed his mad push for making America a theocracy. Incidentally, Moore has gone on record before and stated his opinion that non-Christians like Hindus or Buddhists aren't "real" religions, and don't deserve 1st Amendment protections, and even has stated his belief that an unborn zygote should have more rights than they do. He founded a SuperPAC that funded a celebration of the anniversary of the day Alabama seceded from the union to join the Confederacy in 2010, claims Thomas Jefferson did not intend for the First Amendment to apply to non-Christians and that he was a fierce opponent of abortion, and has called for the impeachment of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Judge Moore is also stubbornly anti-gay, and is not only opposed to gay marriage, but believes that gay couples who have adopted should have their children taken away from them, arguing that "the laws of our state have always recognized the Biblical admonition" and comparing the acceptance to same sex marriage as being akin to "following Nazi orders". In fact, it was his refusal to acknowledge the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges ruling that got Moore removed from the Alabama Supreme Court a second time in 2016. He also floated his belief that Congressman Keith Ellison was illegitimate because he was sworn in with a Quran, and not a Bible (go figure, Ellison's a Muslim), and advised parents to pull their children out of public school if it dares to teach evolution. Where things got truly interesting was when Moore decided to run for office to replace Sen. Jeff Sessions as a U.S. Senator for Alabama in 2017… we had no idea how staggeringly more insane the story of this little lunatic might get. With the help of white supremacist supporters like Steve Bannon, Breitbart News, and every intolerant ideological extremist in the GOP, Roy Moore threw down in the GOP Primary for U.S. Senate against establishment GOP candidate Luther Strange. Moore was eccentric as ever, pulling out a pistol in front of a crowd at a campaign rally, and riding a horse to the polls to vote. The unthinkable happened… Roy Moore won that primary. Some national Democrats began to wonder that in a matchup between Roy Moore, if his opponent, attorney Doug Jones, could win. Yes, it was Alabama, one of the reddest states in the union, but Jones was actually a pretty solid candidate, with his history of successfully prosecuting members of the Ku Klux Klan who carried out a church bombing that resulted in four girls’ deaths decades earlier. And, y’know, Moore had already shown himself bats*** extreme enough to have been not once, but twice removed from office for refusing to honor the rulings of the Supreme Court. It shouldn’t have even been a question if Jones should have had a chance, but… Alabama. Well, then the question got easier to ask, because as it turns out, Roy Moore’s reputation of a dedicated Christian man neglected to include that while he was an assistant prosecutor in Gadsden, Alabama four decades ago, he was a serial pedophile. When one woman comes forward, maybe there’s some chance people might not believe them. But when seven of them come forward, and members of Gadsden law enforcement and people who run both the Gadsden Mall and Gadsden YMCA come forward and say they banned Roy Moore from the premises for creeping on teenage girls? Kinda hard for even the biggest misogynist to disregard that accusation as having been true… but then again, many Alabama Republicans actually started to argue that they believed his accusers, but that they still would vote for a pedophile before they voted for a Democrat. Hell, Donald Trump even decided it would be a great time to endorse Moore, because sexual predators stick together in the face of accusers. Polls started coming out showing that Doug Jones was tied with Roy Moore after the accusations first hit the news, some even with Jones in the lead. An ideological, fanatical man who preyed on teenage girls like Moore knew he had to dig deep to pull out a victory in the end. And so, he had all the people closest to him talk up how great he was at a last minute rally… that included one friend of Moore’s from his tour of Vietnam talking about how they went to a sex club where you could get child prostitutes together back in the day, and Roy Moore’s wife insisting he wasn’t a bigot because “one of our attorneys is a JEW”. (Note: As it turned out later, their “Jew lawyer” is actually Christian.) The day of the election came, and for the first time in a quarter century, a Democrat was elected to the U.S. Senate in Alabama, with Roy Moore losing to Doug Jones by 22,000 votes. Roy Moore did not accept defeat gracefully, instead insisting that there was “massive voter fraud”, posting insane conspiracy theories about how that happened, and starting to attack Doug Jones’ gay son in social media posts. Nobody bought his voter fraud theories, though, because Alabama has a Republican Secretary of State whose entire reputation is about stomping out voter fraud with Voter ID laws and voter suppression tactics (the latter of which did pop up to HELP Roy Moore, and there are ACLU lawsuits filed to prevent them in future elections). A judge certified Doug Jones’ victory, and that was that. Roy Moore currently has bigger problems, though. Like being sued by his accusers for defamation for all the ways he called them liars after they came forward, and he and his wife should probably pay their “not actually Jewish” lawyer a bunch of money to protect them from the fact that the charity they run is being investigated for fraud by the IRS. And YET… we have an update. Yes, we thought last year that we would have heard the last of Roy Moore, but we’ll be goddamned if this creeptastic, intolerant old sumb**** has not filed to run for U.S. Senate again in 2020. He was a long-shot what with only $34,000 in donations on hand as of October, and several more renowned Republicans without a track record of being alleged of trying to woo teenage girls running in the primary against him, including former Attorney General Jeff Sessions trying to slide his way back into the Senate on a slime trail, Congressman Bradley Byrne taking a crack at things, and former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville throwing his hat in the ring. And alas, Roy Moore finished fourth among all GOP candidates with 7.2% of the vote. We’re keeping our fingers crossed that NOW we’re going to be able to say this will the last time we have to update a profile on him, and he’s going to f*** off and into retirement. Hopefully nowhere near a junior high school.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2022, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profiled Jack Williams, who served District 47 of the Alabama House of Representatives from 2004-2018. And of course, being an Alabama Republican, we could gesture in the direction of his voting record to note extremist stances on issues, whether it was trying to prevent the removal of Confederate monuments, trying to allow adoption agencies to deny LGBTQ couples the right to adopt children, voting for a bill to suspend all marriage licenses in a bid to stop same sex marriage, supporting any and all anti-choice legislation that came before him, or voting to bring back the barbaric execution method of the electric chair, this guy was in lockstep with the worst the Alabama GOP had in office. But, our reason for profiling Williams is that he was arrested in April of 2018 on bribery charges brought forward based on his activities while in the lower chamber of the Alabama state legislature. The lawmaker, along with former state GOP Chairman Marty Connors, and Trina Healthcare CEO Ford Gilbert, were arrested in early April and charged with conspiracy to commit bribery related to federal programs and conspiracy to commit honest services wire fraud and honest services wire fraud. The Department of Justice accused the men of conspiring to create a plan to push a bill through the Alabama Legislature in 2016 that would have required Blue Cross and Blue Shield to cover diabetes treatments offered by Trina Health, a California company owned by Gilbert that had three clinics in the state to which the insurance company had denied treatment coverage. Gilbert allegedly paid House Majority Leader Micky Hammon to help with the bill and hired Connors to act as a lobbyist. Hammon and Connors then allegedly recruited Williams, the chairman of the Commerce and Small Business Committee, to hold a public hearing on the bill. That’s… a lotta corruption. Williams signed a pre-trial diversion agreement to avoid jail time, and defiantly insisted on finishing out the remainder of his term in office.

On this date in 2023, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day”, recapped the career of the former U.S. House Representative from Alabama’s 1st Congressional District, Bradley Byrne, who served in office from 2013 to 2020. He was an Alabama State Senator from 2003 to 2007, and had a failed gubernatorial run in 2010, which was in part due to the “controversy” that he may not have thought the Bible was infallible, but he assured voters he believed “every word of the Bible is true”, and that he had worked throughout his political career to get Creationism taught in schools. During his time in office, he kept turning up as the sponsor of bills to repeal the Affordable Care Act, established himself as a hardliner on women’s issues, including the time he co-sponsored an Amendment to the 14th Amendment of the Constitution that would grant constitutional rights to fetuses. He was so into guns that he literally held a town hall at a gun store in 2019, only three days after a mass shooting. The second half of his time in office was, of course, the dreaded Trump administration, and Byrne voted with Trump 97% of the time he was in Congress, including against both impeachments and dove to the right so hard that he was willing to be one of the 41 miscreant Republicans that crashed a classified hearing behind mouth-breathing twit, Matt Gaetz. Bradley Byrne’s career came to an end in the 2020 elections when he didn’t want to repeat his mistake of endorsing notable alleged pedophile Roy Moore in 2017, himself made an unsuccessful bid for U.S. Senate, getting defeated in the GOP Primary by seditionist pea-brain Tommy Tuberville. We will set aside his profile at this time to profile another wacky Republican today instead. (Current crazy/stupid scoreboard, is now 1286-60, since this was established in July 2014.


Wayne Wallingford
Welcome to what is the 1286th original profile here at “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day”, where we’ll be profiling former Missouri State Senator Wayne Wallingford, who served District 27 of that body for eight years from 2013-2021, and that tenure was sandwiched around two non-consecutive terms serving Distrct 147 of the Missouri House of Representatives, the latter one from 2021-2022 and the first from 2011-2023… so yes, this is another Republican extremist who arrived as a part of the 2010 Tea Party Wave.

We’re profiling Wallingford because he was one of two members of the Missouri State Senate in 2017 who mocked women during debates on abortion, saying they should “go to the zoo” if they wanted to get the procedure. The quote:

”Maybe we should send the people that want an abortion to the St. Louis Zoo, because we know it’ll be safer.”

Wallingford’s tag team partner in this discussion was Missouri State Senator Bob Onder, who we will absolutely be profiling at a later date, and who helped make the comparison to euthanizing zoo animals to women getting abortions.

While his whole voting record for his twelve years in office shows how Missouri has fallen into a right-wing spiral, we won’t get into every detail, but just give you an idea of how extreme this guy is… at one point, he was trying to find an end around to circumvent the separation of church and state by instead of trying to blatantly have “the Bible” taught in schools, he wanted it to be “Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament”… which when you back away, is obviously referring to the Old Testament and then the New Testament, aka THE BIBLE.

Wayne Wallingford was promoted to run the Missouri Department of Revenue by Gov. Mike Parson in 2022. This was based on his experience in exploiting low income workers as a corporate taskmaster for McDonald’s and Taco Bell. He no longer needs to be elected to negatively impact the citizens of the Show-Me State from the legislature, he's now able to do it as part of the executive branch.

[AnakinFlair]

Not sure if it was mentioned yet, but McConnell is pitching doubt on any immigration bill now. Apparently, his lord and master Orange Julius wants to keep it an issue to hammer Biden with. That said, I can't see how the Republicans wouldn't get hammered as well, as now they are the ones obstructing any legislation.

[aja_christopher]

Not sure if it was mentioned yet, but McConnell is pitching doubt on any immigration bill now. Apparently, his lord and master Orange Julius wants to keep it an issue to hammer Biden with. That said, I can't see how the Republicans wouldn't get hammered as well, as now they are the ones obstructing any legislation.

[aja_christopher]

Republicans only believe in laws for others.