Trump’s basket of deplorables strike again
lol on this dumbass calling Georgia a town.
Trump’s basket of deplorables strike again
lol on this dumbass calling Georgia a town.
Last edited by Amadeus Arkham; 11-21-2020 at 11:22 AM.
"I love mankind...it's people I can't stand!!"
- Charles Schultz.
There came a time when the Old Gods died! The Brave died with the Cunning! The Noble perished locked in battle with unleashed Evil! It was the last day for them! An ancient era was passing in fiery holocaust!
On this date in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, as well as 2018, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day posted profiles of the U.S. House Representative from Virginia’s 10th Congressional District, Barbara Comstock, the former U.S. House Representative for Virginia's 10th District, who was a former opposition research specialist from the 2000 Bush campaign and Blackwater lobbyist who as a Virginia state legislator who boldly supported legislation to help out her fellow women like mandatory trans-vaginal ultrasounds for women seeking an abortion and Personhood bills that would outlaw many kinds of birth control. Heck, back in 2012, while campaigning for Mitt Romney, she called equal pay for women a part of the “left wing agenda” and argued against the Lilly Ledbetter act. During her first campaign to win a seat in Congress, she expressed opinions like $250,000 of income a year “not being rich”, that we could solve our immigration crisis by tracking undocumented immigrants like FedEx packages, and that she wanted to push for additional Benghazi investigations, because the eight we’d had already at the time weren’t enough. She was in office from two terms from 2015-2019, and was swept away by the 2018 Blue Wave after spending her last term in office fleeing both her constituents, and the media, diving into elevators at the capitol whenever possible to do either.
John Merrill
It was on this date one year ago that “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” first profiled the sitting Alabama Secretary of State, and 2020 U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama, John Merrill, who formerly served a four year term in the Alabama House of Representatives from 2010 through 2014. John Merrill, during his four year career as a legislator, he supported bills to do things like create stricter voter ID laws to disenfranchise voters (that would be overturned as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court but five years after he voted for it), to pass one of the most brutal anti-immigrant laws in the country, to try and nullify the Affordable Care Act, practice the unconstitutional and failed conservative policy of drug testing welfare recipients, and to try to outlaw abortion when a fetal heartbeat is detected (i.e. at six weeks, when many women don’t even realize they’re pregnant yet).
And his voting record isn’t even the beginning of this story. Although, his support of voter disenfrachisement didn’t stop with but one bill. A study done by researchers at Auburn University has found that Merrill is bad at his job as Secretary of State, either by incompetence or deliberate sabotage, take your pick. The study focused on the quality of Alabama's county voting and election websites, and found statewide problems with information provided to voters. Their evaluation of the relationship between voting systems and "demographic, socioeconomic, partisan, and participatory composition" of counties showed "limited voting and election information and are not in full compliance with accessibility, usability, and mobile readiness standards." Further, the extent to which voting and elections information are provided is "related to county composition." (Short version: It seemed like counties with African Americans were given less access to good information, and voting access.)
So, in light of this study, Merrill was interviewed in a documentary about voter suppression just prior to the 2016 election about his failings as Secretary of State, and he actually made the argument that increasing voter registration would “Cheapen the work” of civil-rights advocates like Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. Enacting automatic voter registration to undo voter suppression and boos election would, in Merrill’s warped little mind, allow people who are too “lazy” to vote now to have the “privilege” of voting.
Yeah, that’s a real motherf***er of a stupid argument to make, but he made it.
Alas, it isn’t only voter suppression and racism that we’re going to make note of before we close out our original look at John Merrill… it’s the homophobia. He’s been complaining about homosexuals being depicted positively and too often on television, and longs for the days when “Gunsmoke, Bonanza, The Virginian, Andy Griffith, I Love Lucy.” (Bonanza is the most recent of those shows, and it has been off the air since 1973, when Merrill was nine years old).
The most damning quote:
This isn’t a one-off comment, either, as Merrill doubled-down on his frustration with people accepting that gay people exist on television, but not limiting himself to fictional content, instead attacking a United States gold medalist, soccer star Megan Rapinoe, because HOW DARE SHE BE AN OUT AND PROUD LESBIAN AND PEOPLE BE OKAY WITH THAT.
John Merrill ran for U.S. Senate in 2020, but when it became clear he had no path to victory, he dropped out prior to the primary. He still will be Alabama Secretary of State until 2022, and we’re expecting him to give us all constant reminders why we need a new Voting Rights Act at least until that time.
Last edited by worstblogever; 11-21-2020 at 01:37 PM.
X-Books Forum Mutant Tracker/FAQ- Updated every Tuesday.
Matt Yglesias has a take on divides between media organizations: it's not veteran political journalists versus younger activist political journalists; it's political journalists who have experience with conservatives versus younger progressives who have limited exposure to views outside of their bubble.
The media industry has long skewed young, educated, and New Yorky. But digital disruption trends have made it more so than ever before. Daily newspapers published in mid-sized cities and small towns are weaker and less significant. A lot of reporters born in the 1960s and 1970s have left the industry as it has shrunk and few of them work at digital native startups.
Separately from that change, national politics has been polarizing around age, educational attainment and population density in an unprecedented way. A group of young, recent college graduates living in Brooklyn would’ve skewed left in 1990 but this was an era when Al D’Amato could win statewide in New York and Democratic presidential campaigns would win in West Virginia. Today a demographically identical group skews much further left than it used to. None of this is really an outcome that anyone particularly wanted or intended. But it’s put a big thumb on the scales ideologically at the exact same time that economic trends have turned against the startups.
The result is that I think you should expect the instability we’ve seen this fall to be just the leading edge of the wedge.
Reeves Wiedeman’s recent article about internal tensions at The New York Times includes this passage, which gets at a dynamic that I think you see across the media landscape. The vast majority of the people who work at any given publication are not professional political journalists, and generally the further you get from the ~~political journalism~~ section of a media organization the more left-wing things get:People who cover politics professionally, for better or worse, end up spending a fair amount of time talking to Republicans and trying to understand what conservatives think about public policy issues. If we’re doing our jobs at all correctly we can do stories that bring a mostly-progressive audience a greater understanding of what is happening on the other side. And when a professional political reporter does a bad job it’s often because he or she is taking a dive to maintain relationships with sources on the right, or bending over too far backwards to be fair.
Of all the fronts on which the Times was being pushed to change, the strongest insurrectionary energy was coming from legions of newsroom-adjacent employees in digital jobs that didn’t exist a decade ago. The employees responsible for distributing the Times in the past — typesetters, pressmen, delivery drivers — had never been encouraged to speak up about the ethical questions at the heart of the paper’s journalism. But the app developers and software engineers who deliver the Times’ journalism to the world have held their hands up in just as many Ivy League seminars as their editorial peers. They might be too shy to march over to a masthead editor and complain about a clumsy headline, but #newsroom-feedback had opened a digital door to criticism. Reporters found that suddenly it was the Times’ programmers and developers, rather than their editors, who were critiquing their work. During the town hall about the Cotton op-ed, one data engineer said on Slack, “How many such process failures would be tolerated in tech?”
Many of the techsurrectionists had come from Facebook or Uber or Amazon to join the Times out of a sense of mission, leaving the ethical quandaries of the tech industry for what they thought were more virtuous pastures. “I joined the company for one reason, and it’s because I feel a responsibility to be a part of a mission that I believe in,” a product manager who previously worked at Apple wrote in #newsroom-feedback after the Cotton op-ed. “This feels like the rug’s been pulled out from under us — not just because it feels like that mission [has] been severely compromised by the decision to publish this piece, but even more so because the products we’re building were used to do it.”
“It’s like making telephone poles,” one software engineer added, “and finding out they’re being used as battering rams.”
At the same time, we political journalists have our fair share of totally ignorant hot takes about music or cooking or sports or whatever else that we can fire off.
The flip side is that our colleagues who cover sports or music or cooking also have hot takes about politics. Hot takes that come from the very narrow demographic and ideological niche that dominates the media and is untempered by the need to actually cover politics.
Sincerely,
Thomas Mets
What's in blue is a bummer, but it's also about what I expected.
A few of the other names don't exactly fill me with hope either.
Maybe Biden gets serious about the dealing with things under the wider umbrella of McDonald being murdered.
Fingers crossed.
A friend of mine just won the local town Ward Council election. However, I just heard from my friend that his opponent, a Republican, is taking a page from Trump's playbook and suing the county for a recount. Apparently he isn't taking his loss very well. It was a close race, but that didn't surprise me. Still, even with a narrow win, I can't see how this challenge to the results would change much.
Original join date: 11/23/2004
Eclectic Connoisseur of all things written, drawn, or imaginatively created.
That's not the goalpost you established, which Kirby101 suggested was obviously true, when you described the only policy “differences” that you can see between Democrats and Republicans.
By the way you phrased it, any exception can demonstrate that your understanding of politics and current events to be wrong.
This is why I don't think you actually believe what you said. You're pissed at Republicans, but what you said is meant to be taken seriously but not literally, which is also one of the main defenses of Trump's rhetoric.
Sincerely,
Thomas Mets
Oh WBE, Mike Kelly is back in the news with some new BS.
BREAKING: Republican Congressman Mike Kelly has filed a new frivolous lawsuit in Pennsylvania seeking to block the state from certifying the election results and having the state legislature choose electors.
Opinions may vary in quality.
My big article on Mariko Tamaki's Hulk & She-Hulk runs, discussing the good, bad, and its creation.
My second big article on She-Hulk, discussing Jason Aaron's focus on her in Avengers #20.
The city's law dept did reach a $5 million settlement to the family probably with Emanuel's urging but I think he made the right decision not to run for that third term. That being said I think his experience working in the Clinton & Obama administrations would be an asset as long as it was something not very high profile. He's probably one of the top candidates for Secretary of the Dept of Transportation.
Rahm isn't even liked by the citizens of Chicago. On the left or the right. The fact he keeps falling up is disgusting.