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

[AnakinFlair]

True, but we don't know if Biden will run, and we don't know what Harris will look like in 3 years. There is an eternity of politics before 24.

Also, everyone talks about how little Harris has accomplished so far. The only things I can tell you a Vice President has done is take over after an assassination (Johnson), resign in disgrace (Agnew), build the internet (Gore), and be Obama's wingman (Biden). I couldn't tell you one thing Biden did as VP, other than supporting the troops, since he's well known for that. I can' tell you one thing that Bush Sr. did as VP, just that he took over after Reagan. So let's give her more than 11 months to get something going before we all declare her a disaster and a losing candidate.

[Tami]

Also, everyone talks about how little Harris has accomplished so far. The only things I can tell you a Vice President has done is take over after an assassination (Johnson), resign in disgrace (Agnew), build the internet (Gore), and be Obama's wingman (Biden). I couldn't tell you one thing Biden did as VP, other than supporting the troops, since he's well known for that. I can' tell you one thing that Bush Sr. did as VP, just that he took over after Reagan. So let's give her more than 11 months to get something going before we all declare her a disaster and a losing candidate.

Harris is being held to a higher, and unreasonable, standard than other previous VPs. Just compare her to Pence, for example. VPs aren't supposed to overshadow the President, mostly when they are assigned work they do it in the background, and rarely in their first year.

[JB]

Also, everyone talks about how little Harris has accomplished so far. The only things I can tell you a Vice President has done is take over after an assassination (Johnson), resign in disgrace (Agnew), build the internet (Gore), and be Obama's wingman (Biden). I couldn't tell you one thing Biden did as VP, other than supporting the troops, since he's well known for that. I can' tell you one thing that Bush Sr. did as VP, just that he took over after Reagan. So let's give her more than 11 months to get something going before we all declare her a disaster and a losing candidate.

The biggest issue I see coming up a lot is the border, which Harris was put in charge of. So critics are using the mess going on down there to judge her performance. Although imo it's a mess that cannot possibly be fixed easily or quickly.

[Malvolio]

Since when do we expect the Vice President to actually do anything? The VP is the national understudy. You know, just in case, God forbid... But the right wing media has set up Harris for failure, just like they did with Hillary Clinton. Let's not play into their bullshit this time.

[Kirby101]

The biggest issue I see coming up a lot is the border, which Harris was put in charge of. So critics are using the mess going on down there to judge her performance. Although imo it's a mess that cannot possibly be fixed easily or quickly.

And when she did do something, like go to the countries that were the source of the people coming up to the border to get to the root of the problem, all they asked was "Why aren't you at the border?"

[JB]

And when she did do something, like go to the countries that were the source of the people coming up to the border to get to the root of the problem, all they asked was "Why aren't you at the border?"

Exactly, it can't be solved overnight as it directly has to do with the economic condition of those countries.

[worstblogever]

On this date, in 2014, in 2015, and in 2016, "Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day" published profiles of Charles Van Zant, from the Florida House of Representatives. This fervent social conservative has repeatedly tried passing laws to completely outlaw abortion, which he has compared to the Holocaust, and says kills 1 in 4 African American children in the United States, making it even deadlier for them than the Ku Klux Klan. Seriously, he went there. Van Zant was also highly concerned that Common Core education is “turning all the children gay”, and has repeatedly pushed for legislation that would instead allow prayer in public schools (in spite of that sort of thing being unconstitutional via our separation of church and state). While those painfully stupid misconceptions might be enough to get someone booted for office, inexplicably no one has run against Van Zant in a primary or general election since he first won office in 2008. For four consecutive election cycles, this boob has been allowed to help make Florida… well… Florida. As we also mentioned in our 2015 profile, Charles Van Zant couldn’t stand the thought of missing out on trying to outlaw abortion or stopping homosexuality from being, y’know, tolerated in our society. So he decided he would govern by proxy, and his wife Katherine was going to run for the seat he has to give up in January. And just when it seemed like that would come to pass, both Mr. and Mrs. Van Zant were revealed by the media to have illegitimately claimed a homestead exemption on their taxes since 2008 on a property that no one actually lives in. Defrauding your local government out of thousands of dollars in bogus tax breaks was enough to cause Katherine Van Zant to lose the GOP primary to her opponent, so both Charles and his wife are now out of Florida politics.

On this date in 2017, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profiled Mark Assini, who very nearly unseated Democratic Congresswoman Louise Slaughter in New York’s 25th District in the 2014 elections, coming within about 1,000 votes of doing so and refusing to concede the election to her until eight days later. In 2016, he figured he’d give it another shot, but things did not quite go according to plan, mostly because old blog posts written by Assini back from 2005-2009 were discovered where he had some delightful opinions about the LGBTQ community. Oh, sorry, did we say delightful? We meant hateful and bigoted. Links to those articles show Assini agreeing with a reader who called members of the LGBTQ community "sexual deviants" and quoting a pastor who called transgender individuals "mentally disturbed." But the best quote was probably that he wanted the only openly gay Congressman at the time, Barney Frank, jailed for imagined crimes, and threw in a prison rape joke while he was at it, writing, “Barney Frank should go to prison. Old Barney would have plenty of dates along with three squares and cable TV.” There were also plenty of press releases from Assini that made misleading and xenophobic claims about illegal immigrants committing crimes in the United States. Assini has not resurfaced yet in politics.

On this date in 2018, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profile, where we’ll be talking about Joshua Youssef, a candidate for New Hampshire State Senate back in 2012 who lost in the general election with 41% of the vote, and that may have had something to do with the fact his ex-wife’s attorney had a blog that noted that Youssef was behind on paying both child support, as well as numerous tax debts, and that story started to get covered by the local media. Youssef then tried to “bury the lede” by creating his own version of the lawyer’s blog that would praise himself, and discredit the lawyer, but the state attorney general had to bring Youssef up on charges of election fraud. And, being terrible to his former spouse, a tax cheat, and convicted felon wasn’t enough to stop Donald Trump from hiring Youssef to head his 2016 presidential campaign headquarters in Belknap County. He was also a delegate sent to the 2016 Republican National Convention to cast his vote there for Trump, but alas, with “very good people” like Joshua Youssef working for Donald Trump in New Hampshire, that wasn’t enough to help him win the state in the 2016 election over Hillary Clinton. So instead, when Donald Trump claimed that Clinton won the state due to “voter fraud” and that illegal voters were brought in by bus to help her win the campaign (with no evidence whatsoever of this happening), Joshua Youssef furthered the theory. And by that, we mean he went on CNN to be interviewed by Alisyn Camerota and lie his arse off. Youssef was called out for believing such a paranoid conspiracy theory, and forced to slowly back away from the story. To sum up so far… Donald Trump hired a man convicted of election fraud to run his campaign, who then tried accusing Democrats of election fraud without evidence, and had to backpedal after being caught in such an easy lie. Now, these reasons would probably be enough to earn a CSGOPOTD profile and for us to call it a day. But Joshua Youssef is much, much more dangerous and odious of a human being. It wasn’t long ago that we also had a profile of Robert Fisher, a former New Hampshire state legislator who was outed for creating a Reddit group called “The Red Pill” that defended raping women, and offered advice to “men’s rights activists” about how to get away with the crime. And when Robert Fisher had a day job at a business called Same Day Computer, you’ll never guess who his boss was… Joshua Youssef. Who also ended up being outed as a “Men’s Rights activist” whose bitter divorce had him posting hateful things about women and feminists online as well. We’re glad Youssef has never won an election, and now it seems a done deal that he never will.

On this date in 2019, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profiled Mike Kennedy, a former member of the Utah House of Representatives from 2013-2019 in District 27.Kennedy’s former district, as it is… is about as conservative as you’ll find of any one in the state, and all Kennedy had to do was survive the GOP Primary and could cake walk into re-election in the state legislature, winning with 92% in 2012, 88% in 2014, and 100% in 2016 because he was completely unopposed. Kennedy is both a doctor, with a MD from Michigan State, as well as a lawyer with a JD from Brigham Young University. And that’s why it was kind of mind-blowing to see such an educated guy speak before the Utah House of Representatives in 2014, and claim that more poor people would die if they had proper access to healthcare, saying,”Sometimes access to healthcare can be damaging and dangerous… I’ve heard from National Institutes of Health and otherwise that we’re killing up to a million, a million and a half people every year in our hospitals. And it’s access to hospitals that’s killing those people.” Fearmongering about dangerous hospitals… when you’re a doctor? WHAT? But maybe Mike Kennedy doesn’t know what’s dangerous and what’s not. After all, he’ll hang out with pro-gun groups extreme enough that they appear in towns where the Parkland survivors are to auction off assault rifles and insult those gun violence survivors. Other than that, Mike Kennedy is a big defender of Trump administration immigration policies, and as a legislator, voted against a bill to end discrimination based on sexual orientation, voted to return to using the firing squad as a means of execution for capital crimes, voted against the Medicaid Expansion, and even voted against a bill to outlaw bigamy in Utah. So here’s the thing… if Kennedy’s district was so conservative, how did he end up losing office? Well, delusions of grandeur being what they are, with the retiring of Sen. Orrin Hatch, Kennedy thought it was time to move up into the big leagues, and run for U.S. Senate. There’s just one catch to that plan… another Republican had designs on that Senate seat… and his name is Mitt Romney. Kennedy got 52% of the votes… at the Utah Republican Party convention. When voting was opened up to the public, he was crushed at the polls, and only got 28% of the vote. He did not run for his old seat in 2020.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2020, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profiled Eric Redman, who was a member of the Idaho House of Representatives in District 2B from 2014 through 2018. Redman was actively pushing policy based on the advice of an anti-Muslim hate group, and got called out for those efforts by the Southern Poverty Law Center. This wasn’t actively the toughest case to crack, as two days before Eric Redman sponsored HB 419, a bill that targeted the threat of Sharia Law in the United States, ACT for America was already hyping the legislation on their website. Now, never mind that the threat of Sharia Law on the rise that doesn’t actually exist, there might as well be a law about preventing unicorn attacks… but even if someone was intent on establishing Sharia Law anywhere in the country, such laws would be immediately invalidated as unconstitutional via the establishment clause of the First Amendment that prevents a separation of church and state. Hatemongers and bigots tend to not deal in facts, or have a keen understanding of basic civics classes. But we won’t bury the lede… Eric Redman was in cahoots with a hate group to let them know his plans. Upon further research via a FOIA request, the SPLC determined there had been no less than 47 e-mails exchanged between Redman and ACT for America over just 15 months. He submitted multiple bills aimed at “foreign laws”, one of which included illustrations of a hand about to be chopped off, and another image of a man about to be beheaded that made it pretty clear what sorts of folks Redman was talking about in bigoted terms. While in his final attempt to get a bill passed in Idaho, Redman was pretending the bill wasn’t aimed at Muslims, it’s interesting to note that he shared videos on social media that fear-mongered about Islam. Eric Redman made a 2017 announcement that he would not run for a third term in the Idaho State Legislature, around the time the SPLC were hot on his heels, and Redman began a campaign to try and oust fellow Republicans who didn’t go along with the plan set forth by his favorite hate group. It may come as little surprise that when you peek at his overall voting record, he voted to have the Bible put into public school classrooms as a teaching aid, voted for “Stand Your Ground” laws in Idaho, for ridiculously strict abortion restrictions, supported a bill to remove members of the judiciary that support same sex marriage, and even against a minimum wage increase in the greatest period of income inequality in our nation’s history. We’ll note he’s retired from office, and set aside his profile our to cover another wacky Republican today instead. (Current crazy/stupid scoreboard, is now 1048-50, since this was established in July 2014.


Lavern Spicer

Welcome to what is the 1048th original profile here at “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day”, where we’ll be profiling Lavern Spicer, who was a 2020 candidate for U.S. House of Representatives in Florida’s 24th Congressional District, hoping to knock of Democratic Congresswoman Frederica Wilson. She had the benefit of there being no GOP Primary for the seat, and thus she was the only candidate on the ballot for them. She is yet the latest in our way, way too long line of Republicans who ran for Congress in 2020 who were also adherents of the Qanon conspiracy theory. She repeatedly linked to a Q video called “The Fall of the Cabal”, that was the tip of the spear for many supporters of the conspiracy theory for first learning of it.

Lavern Spicer got absolutely wrecked by Frederica Wilson on Election Day in 2020, getting just 20% of the vote. She immediately regrouped for a 2022 campaign, but does not seem like she’ll be having much more luck, considering the headlines she drew for her take on Kyree Irving of the Brooklyn Nets’ refusing to get the Covid-19 vaccine, and thus making himself ineligible to practice or play with teammates per New York’s pandemic guidelines. Upon hearing there was a fellow anti-vaxx loon out there getting skewered by the media for his stance, Lavern Spicer got on Twitter to try to show she didn’t understand several things… like modes of tran smission for viruses, or vaccinations, or… false equivalencies.

“They let Magic Johnson play basketball with FULL-BLOWN HIV but won’t let Kyrie Irving play because he won’t get a COVID shot.”

The top two replies to her idiocy were clearly:

”Didn’t know HIV could spread thru the air”

”Are you aware that NBA players do not have penetrative sex during a game?”

Anyway… Lavern Spicer’s 2022 campaign for Congress now hedges on if she can get people to believe she’s going to Washington to impeach the “tyrant” Joe Biden over mandating federal employees and the military get the Covid-19 vaccine. We’ll note that the main media outlet touting her as a candidate is RT, aka Russia Today. Interesting source of support, that.

We are hoping this will be the only time we have to make mention of her.

[Tami]

School shooting in Michigan. 3 dead, 6 injured. Shooter is 15 years old and is in custody.

[Robotman]

Also, everyone talks about how little Harris has accomplished so far. The only things I can tell you a Vice President has done is take over after an assassination (Johnson), resign in disgrace (Agnew), build the internet (Gore), and be Obama's wingman (Biden). I couldn't tell you one thing Biden did as VP, other than supporting the troops, since he's well known for that. I can' tell you one thing that Bush Sr. did as VP, just that he took over after Reagan. So let's give her more than 11 months to get something going before we all declare her a disaster and a losing candidate.

I think the situation with Harris is a little different because of Biden’s age. At 78, he’s the oldest person to ever be president. It’s a morbid thought but there is more of a chance of him dying from natural causes than previous modern presidents. Plus the fact that he’ll be 82 by the end of his first term and Harris is seen as the most likely candidate to take over if he chooses not to run for re-election. Frankly I think he shouldn’t run at that age.

[Robotman]

Snakeoil salesman Dr. Oz launched a campaign for PA senate as a Republican.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/ele...edium=news_tab

[WestPhillyPunisher]

School shooting in Michigan. 3 dead, 6 injured. Shooter is 15 years old and is in custody.

Yeah, I’ve heard about that. Scary as sin.

[Kirby101]

Snakeoil salesman Dr. Oz launched a campaign for PA senate as a Republican.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/ele...edium=news_tab

It will be fun watching the position he has to adopt to win the Primary. He also has to kiss Trump's ass.

[babyblob]

Snakeoil salesman Dr. Oz launched a campaign for PA senate as a Republican.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/ele...edium=news_tab

My Question is how does he win over the Q nut jobs. because he has talked about the vaccines and masks being a good thing and needed on his show in the past.

[Scott Taylor]

School shooting in Michigan. 3 dead, 6 injured. Shooter is 15 years old and is in custody.

Apparently with a semi-automatic handgun and it was in the Detroit area. Tragic.