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

[CSTowle]

You may be responding to some arguments I'm not making, when you tell me "stop trying to pretend otherwise." What specifically have I said?

In the article you mentioned the discrepancy between wait times in majority-minority polling places and wait times in 90% white polling places was much more severe than is typical. It was an abnormal discrepancy.

Partisan officials saying something will make it harder for people to vote doesn't make it true. But they complained about polling places being too crowded, and then they complained about the addition of new polling places.

They may be able to sell Republicans on the idea that the local boards in Atlanta are inept and cannot be trusted to administer elections, although that argument would likely have to be made explicitly.

He does not appear to be a top candidate.

The frontrunner for the nomination seems to be former congressman Lou Barletta who won a statewide primary in 2018.

A former US Attorney is expected to run. A state senator has an exploratory committee. Two members of Congress and a former state speaker have also expressed interest.

The conservatives on the thread were pretty quiet before Trump's lost.

I'm not sure the demographics of the hobby explain the make-up of the political board.

And while I'm described as the loudest conservative, I'm willing to vote for Democrats, and did so in the last general election. In a general political discussion, Trump supporters should be welcome to participate.

That was just my guess/speculation, it's an artsy type of hobby (even if it's only mostly on the consumer's end of the art) so I can see that skewing left. As opposed to maybe a video game chatboard or sports talk. While I suppose we've never had much of a balance politically for posters on this line of threads, it's gotten worse since the changeover and the banning at the drop of a hat. Also, and here my bias may be showing, most of the conservative arguments on these boards tend to be insulting and emotional and without much in the way of an actual argument or logic. When people on the left call them on that the reaction it's usually to insult back and forth for a bit and then retreat.

Why I've praised you in the past, because even when I (or others) disagree with you there's usually an argument given and the logic behind what you're thinking (whether, again, we agree with it or not) and you're much more likely to be insulted than to give insults. And I'd say there's plenty of emotional and illogical arguments that reflexively defend some politicians and policies on the left/center, they're just less likely to be called out because of the political makeup of the people posting. You can also get the same insult for insult or a kick-circle of insults attempting to silence someone going against the narrative. Why I try to point that out when I see it, it's not great behavior and not a good look for confidence in one's argument.

I get being upset, there's been a lot in the last four years to be upset about and we're not even to the hard push to ban abortion rights or seeing the outcome of voter suppression, but it's better to take a beat and articulate the best argument for what you're thinking with as little insult or emotion as possible. Insults and emotion make it a lot easier to dismiss an argument if someone isn't inclined already to agree with you. Logic/rationality might not make them agree with you either, but it makes it harder to dismiss outright as they're going to want to do (few like having their beliefs undermined or questioned).

[WestPhillyPunisher]

I know I can't laugh about it these days. We have a poison that is working it's way through the population and that poison is Trumpism.

Yeah, the very same poison that's forced the CDC to revise mandates on mask wearing because scores of idiots, brainwashed by The Former Guy and his sycophants in the Qpublican Party and on Faux News refused to be vaccinated, allowing the delta variant of the virus to run rampant. Damned frustrating!

[Jack Dracula]

I listened to the testimony of the officers on duty at the Capitol on 1/6. Those people are heroes.
This is exactly what the GOP was afraid of. That these proceedings would undo the months of spin and lies they've tried to weave around what happened.

[Tendrin]

They're already busy claiming that these cops are 'crisis actors' and 'radical commies' on twitter.

[Iron Maiden]

Contemptible

[worstblogever]

They're already busy claiming that these cops are 'crisis actors' and 'radical commies' on twitter.

The elected Republicans "back the blue" as much as the Trump supporters did on 1/6. The minute they're inconvenient to clinging to power, they'll bludgeon them with a flag pole and call them slurs.

[PaulBullion]

All this negativity about Organized Crime. You know some Law Enforcement is corrupt. So, same thing, right?

Hashtag #DefundTheMafia

[WestPhillyPunisher]

The elected Republicans "back the blue" as much as the Trump supporters did on 1/6. The minute they're inconvenient to clinging to power, they'll bludgeon them with a flag pole and call them slurs.

Laura Ignoramus backs the blue too:

https://twitter.com/BrianKarem/statu...50641134411778

[worstblogever]

On this date back in 2014, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” published a profile on Herman Cain, the former Godfather’s Pizza CEO who ran for president in 2012, taking his “AWWW… SHUCKY-DUCKY” attitude and tax plan of “NINE, NINE, NINE” onto the campaign trail to try to upset the big favorite for the Republican nomination, Mitt Romney. Cain inexplicably DID become the front runner ahead of Romney for a few weeks, in spite of an old video circulating of him singing a parody of John Lennon’s “Imagine” about pizza, his frequency to give an inspirational quote that was actually the lyrics to the theme song of the Pokemon 2000 movie, his belief that there may be a country called “Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan”, and his promise to put up a 20 foot border wall… with an electrified fence… and a moat… with alligators in it. Cain also said African-Americans had been “brainwashed” for not having a conservative point of view, froze up when asked about intervention in Libya, asked how to say “Delicious” in “Cuban” (which isn’t a language), talked about how the country needed a “leader and not a reader”, promised not to sign any bill more than three pages in length, and created some of the most bizarre campaign ads, including one that closed with him smiling in super-slow motion, and another that ended with his own campaign manager taking a dramatic drag off of a cigarette. And, in spite of all that, he still had wide support as a presidential candidate… until women started to come forth in droves to report that Herman Cain had sexually harassed them while working for him. The day Cain announced he was leaving the presidential race, he pulled up in a bus, and then, passionately and from his heart… he read… the lyrics to “The Power of One” from Pokemon 2000. For two minutes straight. He died in August of 2020, his death attributed to how he was a f***ing moron who weeks prior, attended Donald Trump’s underpopulated MAGA rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma without a mask to prevent being infected with Covid-19. And he got it. And it killed him. Because he was a f***ing moron.

It was on this date in 2015 that we published our original "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" profile of Todd Courser, a fanatical zealot from the Michigan House of Representatives who entered politics because “Jesus wanted him to run to save the party”. He nearly won the role of being the Chairman of the Michigan Republican Party but settled instead for a set in the Michigan House of Representatives. He was 100% pro-life, which did include no exceptions for rape, incest, or risk to the mother’s life, he also believed in no exceptions to the 2nd Amendment and supported “state’s rights”. But Courser’s favorite conservative battle was over “the sanctity of marriage”, where he not only opposed gay marriage, but even gay adoption. His credibility on trying to protect marriage took an amazing hit, though, when he was about to be caught having an affair with fellow anti-gay legislator Cindy Gamrat. Courser’s solution to covering up the affair when it hit the news cycle? He tried talking one of his aides into helping him stage a false separate scandal that would “bury the lead”, that he was paying for sex with male prostitutes. Fortunately, that aide recorded their conversation, and realizing how insane Courser really was, he went to the media with the WHOLE story. Courser and Gamrat were both kicked out of the Michigan state legislature, and have gone on instead, into what else? A career as conservative AM talk radio hosts. Last we heard, Courser was trying to win election as a county prosecutor, but even that seems unlikely. We still say he looks like Marvel Comics villain, the Hulk nemesis known as The Leader, if he were green.

It was on this date in 2016 that we published our original “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” published a profile about David Jolly, a one term Congressman who was once a lobbyist for The Church of Scientology. That… is not a traditional Republican affiliation, by any stretch. But wouldn’t you know it, his district has a higher-than-normal amount of big Scientology donors who contributed to his campaign, and he had the benefit of running for office in a special election, then was completely unopposed in the primary, and still only faced a Libertarian challenger, Alex Sink, in the general election. While Jolly was flying in under the radar in spite of his peculiar background, it became harder to hide as he decided, for whatever reason, to further elevate his profile and threw his hat into the ring to try and replace Sen. Marco Rubio for Florida’s U.S. Senate seat in the 2016 election. While up until this point, Rep. Jolly had no problem with folks knowing about his ties to Scientology, suddenly, he was caught trying to scrub that fact from his Wikipedia page by the press (as well as his previous support for same sex marriage that would hurt his chances in the GOP Primary). During his brief time in Congress, Jolly co-sponsored and voted for HR 36, a 20-week abortion ban, voted with most House Republicans to defund Planned Parenthood, voted for the Islamophobic American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act meant to try and stop aiding Syrian refugees fleeing the civil war there, and generally whatever terrible legislation the GOP vomited forth along partisan lines. Jolly’s ambition at running for U.S. Senate blew up in his face when Marco Rubio broke a promise to not run for re-election to the Senate and coasted past him easily in the GOP Primary, so Jolly has been relegated to cable news these days, where he has been a moderate Republican voice who admits he is embarrassed at what his party has become with Donald Trump as their flag-bearer, and would likely have zero chance to get elected as a member of the GOP anywhere as he’s started coming out in support of the Affordable Care Act (after having voted to repeal it while in Congress).

It was on this date in 2017 that we published our original “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” published a profile about Jon Keyser, a former member of the Colorado House of Representatives, and a guy who was enough of a rising star in the Colorado GOP that he was the favorite to win their nomination in the 2016 Primary to challenge sitting Democratic U.S. Senator Michael Bennet. There was just one wee little problem with this huge upward leap that Keyser was trying to make… he got caught forging the signatures of people on petitions to have his name added to the ballot, in a completely stupid move. That’s not just a way to get disqualified from qualifying for office, but a crime, and it got Keyser 14 days in jail. It’s also the reason why Darryl Glenn became the nominee for U.S. Senate and let Michael Bennet coast to victory into what would have otherwise been a very tight race. Anyway, like we were saying, Jon Keyser only served a little more than a year in office in the Colorado State legislature, and in that time, there are a few other legislative priorities he had that gave us concern. Like his support of HB 1288, to try and allow racial profiling by police departments, his vote against HB 1265, which would have allowed transgendered individuals to change their listed gender from their birth certificate, but most troubling on his record on LGBTQ rights was his vote against HB 1175, which would have created a ban on the barbaric practice of gay conversion therapy being performed on minors. After his disastrous forgery scandal, Jon Keyser moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to work as a corporate lawyer for Harley-Davidson Motorcycles.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2018, 2019, as well as 2020, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” published our original profile of the sitting U.S. House Representative from Pennsylvania’s 4th Congressional District, Scott Perry, who was first elected to office back in 2014 after serving six years in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. While there wasn’t really anything that Congressman Perry did to turn up on CSGOPOTD’s radar in his freshman term in Washington, D.C., in his second term in office, he has been decidedly more idiotic in the public eye.

Let’s start with his town hall from March of 2017, where when he tried arguing against EPA standards trying to stop pollution because “God pollutes, too”. No, we’re serious:

”When I was in the state house, we had a thing called the Chesapeake Bay strategy, which everybody in this room if you live in this district has to abide by. There was no law. There was no statute. This came out of the EPA, forced on the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and left some violators out. And by the way, some violators, if you believe in, if you are spiritual and you believe in God, one of the violators was God because the forests were providing a certain amount of nitrates and phosphates to the Chesapeake Bay.”

Pollution is part of God’s design, you see, so we shouldn’t do anything about it. By this logic, we also shouldn’t treat preventable diseases, but hey, let’s not give ol’ Scott anything else to use to argue against the Affordable Care Act.

Heh. No, actually, Perry’s arguments on healthcare are even dumber, and more selfish than that. In May of 2017, while the debate over the GOP’s attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with a far inferior healthcare plan, the AHCA were underway, Scott Perry argued why maternity care should not be included in health insurance coverage. His reason? He was too old to have kids, and therefore, he sure as hell wasn’t paying for it:

“I don’t want maternity care. I have two children, and we’re not having anymore. I don’t want to pay for maternity care.”

An Indivisible activist pointed out that people who don’t have children or whose children are older still have to pay property taxes, which fund schools, adding that there’s a “social contract” in American society for public goods.

“Without a doubt,” Perry replied. “But there’s also personal responsibility. Some people never want to start a family. ... Some people don’t want to own a Cadillac. But should we want to make everybody pay for a Cadillac?”

Babies aren’t Cadillacs, you simpleton, and comparing the two is nonsense.

Anyway, over the past year, Scott Perry has begun spiraling into flat-out conspiracy theory nonsense, instead of just your typical conservative ideologue like most members of the House Freedom Caucus. In October 2017, in the wake of Hurricane Maria devastating Puerto Rico, he went on CNN to yell at anchor Chris Cuomo and call the reports of a massive death toll and citizens struggling to recover “fake news”. (It’s not fake, almost 5,000 people died as a result of the storm, and the power grid has still not been fully repaired.)

By January of 2018, Rep. Perry was making guest appearances with Tucker Carlson on Fox News to try to re-write history… the Las Vegas shooter, Stephen Paddock wasn’t a mentally ill white guy with a gun fetish gone out of control… the entire Las Vegas shooting, per Perry, was a terror attack orchestrated by ISIS. There is zero evidence outside of Scott Perry’s mouth-hole to indicate that such a statement is true, and he should be removed from his position on the Homeland Security Committee for spreading such a paranoid conspiracy theory, in our humble opinion.

At a town hall in 2020, Scott Perry chillingly admitted there is no line Donald Trump would cross that would lead him to condemn him… in the same meeting where he said he doesn’t like seeing presidents embrace dictators and complaining about former President Obama but neglecting to mention Donald Trump’s relationships with Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un.

[worstblogever]

In the 2020 elections, Perry managed to win re-election with a modest 53% of the vote. If you weren’t getting the feeling that he’s terrible yet, let’s take a look at his voting record:

• October 23rd, 2019: Perry 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 3rd, 2019: Rep. Perry is one of 71 Republicans who votes against a resolution to disallow Russia from re-entering the G7 and makes it the G8 until it leaves Ukraine.
• December 18th, 2019: Perry ignores his Congressional duty to hold a president who has been proven to commit high crimes and misdemeanors accountable and votes against the first impeachment of Donald Trump.
• May 15th, 2020: Perry votes against the HEROES Act, to further support the healthcare industry and citizens affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.
• October 2nd, 2020: Scott Perry votes against a resolution is presented in the House to condemn the Qanon conspiracy theory after its followers started to make death threats against Democratic Congressman Tom Malinowski.
• December 10th, 2020: Perry signs his name to an amicus brief to the Supreme Court, begging them to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The same election that he won re-election in.
• January 6th, 2021: Scott Perry votes for the objection to the electoral college’s votes in the 2020 election, a failure to send any sort of message that he wasn’t intimidated or sympathetic to those who attacked the Capitol to attempt a violent coup.
• January 13th, 2021: Rep. Perry votes against the second impeachment of Donald Trump, because the Republican Party no longer feels like they should be accountable for anything, including failed coups that result in the deaths of both their participants and police officers.
• February 4th, 2021: Scott Perry votes to keep Marjorie Taylor Greene’s committee assignments.
• February 25th, 2021: Perry votes against HR 5, the latest version of the Equality Act, that would provide workplace protections for LGBTQ Americans.
• March 3rd, 2021: Rep. Perry votes against HR 1, a bill created to prevent the corruption of money in politics, and protect voter access to the ballot box.
• March 3rd, 2021: Scott Perry votes against the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021.
• March 10th, 2021: Perry votes against the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, because he feels people deserve to die in poverty during a pandemic.
• March 17th, 2021: Rep. Perry votes 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).
• April 14th, 2021: During a hearing on Central American migration in Congress, Rep. Perry begins espousing white nationalist “replacement theory” on the floor of the House, saying, “For many Americans, what seems to be happening or what they believe right now is happening is, what appears to them is we’re replacing national-born American, native-born Americans to permanently transform the landscape of this very nation.”
• May 19th, 2021: Scott Perry votes against HR 3233, the creation of a commission to investigate the Capitol Attack.
• May 20th, 2021: Perry is one of 63 Republicans who vote against the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act.
• June 15th, 2021: Rep. Perry is one of twenty-one Republicans who pick a side to have rooted for in the failed coup attempt on 1/6/21 and votes against awarding Congressional gold medals to members of the Capitol Police who bravely defended members of Congress during the attack.
• July 22nd, 2021: Perry is one of 16 Republicans who vote against HR 3895, the Allies Act, which was passed without his support to raise the amount of visas offered and to expedite their issue to Afghan translators and their families to honor our promise to protect them against the Taliban after U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, thus feeling we should go back on our word and leave them to die.

We’re at the point where seeing Scott Perry cling to Donald Trump like a life preserver keeping him afloat when in reality, Trump is a loadstone tied around his neck is perplexing. Hearing him talk about “replacement theory” like he was re-reading a Tucker Carlson monologue is downright unsettling. So we’re watching intently to see what the makeup of the Pennsylvania Congressional map in 2022 will look like, especially with the state having one less seat overall when the mid-terms hit in eighteen months. Hopefully the gains Democrats are making in the suburbs continue to trend in their direction, and Perry’s fevered loyalty to Trump’s insurrection are constantly brought up between now and then.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Andrew Clyde is on record calling the 1/6 insurrection a "normal tourist visit":

https://twitter.com/AnnieGrayerCNN/s...81333968662536

Yeah, THIS profile in courage:

[worstblogever]

Andrew Clyde is on record calling the 1/6 insurrection a "normal tourist visit":

https://twitter.com/AnnieGrayerCNN/s...81333968662536

Yeah, THIS profile in courage:

Clyde: "I CHOOSE GASLIGHTING AND SUPPORTING DOMESTIC TERROR."

They're riding this all the way to the bottom. Same for some of the white nationalist voices at Fox News like Ingraham and Carlson, who after YEARS of "back the blue" bulls***, even last summer, are not mocking cops who got attacked by terrorists because they would dare to hold right-wingers accountable for doing so.

It's a good time to keep running these ***holes off camera. All of 'em. Send them scurrying non-stop.

[babyblob]

Clyde: "I CHOOSE GASLIGHTING AND SUPPORTING DOMESTIC TERROR."

They're riding this all the way to the bottom. Same for some of the white nationalist voices at Fox News like Ingraham and Carlson, who after YEARS of "back the blue" bulls***, even last summer, are not mocking cops who got attacked by terrorists because they would dare to hold right-wingers accountable for doing so.

It's a good time to keep running these ***holes off camera. All of 'em. Send them scurrying non-stop.

Lets be honest. Anyone who listens to these people and believes them, anyone who votes QOP at this point after seeing just what they are the last couple years. There is just no excuse. They are just the worst people. A person cant Back Green or watch someone like Carson and Ingraham and pretend to be even the least bit interested in humanity and pretend to be a sane person.
Its not about economics or taxes or small government whatever I have heard people use as an excuse. it is about control, power and racism. Any one who denies that is a liar or an idiot.

[Tami]

As we see with Cheney and Kinzinger, for example, it is possible to be Conservative and Republican, and still be sane enough to be live in Democracy and the to want to protect the country instead of trying to destroy it.

Right now, that is the true litmus test.