A Google Docs list of sex criminals known to be Republicans or MAGA or "conservative" or "Christian" or or or.
Here's the first dozen - out of more than 1,200:
Donald Trump is accused of sexual assault by more than two dozen women. He is accused of raping a 13-year-old girl, talked about having sex with his daughter, bragged of walking in on underage girls at pageants, claimed he can grab women by the pussy. He is convicted of sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll.
Judge Roy Moore is accused of sexual assault and dating underage women.
Jim Jordan is in Republican House leadership though he is accused of ignoring sexual assault of more than a hundred young men while a coach, dismissing it as locker room talk. Students have said they told him and he is said to have called the parents of one complainant asking them to get their son to back off.
Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert sexually abused his high school students. He is outside the statute of limitations but was convicted of paying off/bribing some of his victims.
Cobb County GOP Chairman Joseph Russell Dendy - child molesting - pleaded guilty, life sentence, parole possible in 30 years. He was 72.
So-called "pro-life"/ antigay activist Howard Scott Heldreth was convicted of raping a child.
GOP Ohio County Commissioner David Swartz convicted of raping two girls - released after only 5 years!!!! Back in prison after contacting one of his victims.
Republican judge Mark Pazuhanich pleaded no contest to fondling a 10-year old girl.
Republican anti-abortion activist Nicholas Morency pleaded guilty to possessingChild Sexual Abuse Material on his computer and offering a bounty to anybody who murders an abortion doctor.
Republican Speaker of the House in PR Edison Misla Aldarondo was sentenced to 10 years in prison for raping his daughter between the ages of 9 and 17.
Republican Mayor Philip Giordano is serving a 37-year sentence in federal prison for sexually abusing 8- and 10-year old girls.
Republican campaign consultant Tom Shortridge was sentenced to three years probation for taking nude photographs of a 15-year old girl.
A spineless, soul-less chickenshit Republican attempting to un-Trump himself, but doing it by proxy. He praises Pence in order to signal his resurfacing dislike of Trump (and the MAGAbots) in that very Lindsey Graham-ish passive aggressive way.
On the surface, it seems odd that Republicans express a need for their candidates to have a certain purity, but when it's painfully obvious they don't (eg: Trump), they just kinda make believe that he's pure, or that "he's a flawed man, but forgiven", or they insist on that purity, but not in a virginal way. ie: they want somebody who fucks, but only if that fucking is under official sanction of the church and civil law - and then, strictly heterosexual. Unless you're Lindsey Graham - or they need to take you down by implying something may be "wrong" with your sex life.
They preach a hard-n-fast moral code, but then practice situational ethics. And then they bitch about how nobody has any principles anymore, looking the other way when their own guys screw the proverbial pooch, and then they pat themselves on the back for being charitable and inclusive and forgiving.
Gosh - it's almost as if they don't want us to be able stand on any solid ground that we can really count on.
"Every time we call it a game, you call it a business. And every time we call it a business, you say it's just a game."
Tim Scott’s girlfriend
The unmarried Republican presidential candidate doesn’t like talking about his new relationship very much. But he is talking about it.
In June, as Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) began to get a little momentum in the presidential primary, a person working on behalf of one of Scott’s Republican opponents messaged me, asking to chat.
“Have you seen the video,” he asked over the phone, conspiratorially, “where he says he has a girlfriend?”
The video in question was from a May event organized by the news website Axios, where the interviewer asked the South Carolina senator about the possibility of becoming the first bachelor president since the 19th century. “I probably have more time, more energy and more latitude to do the job,” he replies. And then the senator adds — quickly, as an aside: “My girlfriend wants to see me when I come home.”
The Republican operative who called me wasn’t sure said girlfriend existed. He suggested I look into it. He followed up on our conversation with an email that included a dossier of Scott’s known personal relationships. “No fingerprints,” he said.
Scott’s romantic endeavors aren’t a scandal so much as they are a mystery. At 57, he’s never been married and rarely talks about girlfriends past or present. Late last year, as Scott was ramping up his run for president, I asked Jennifer DeCasper, his close friend and campaign manager, about the status of his dating life. “It’s nonexistent,” she said.
Now, Scott was suggesting otherwise. And the timing of that revelation seemed a bit convenient.
“He has staked so much on his personal story, character and faith,” said the operative, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity because, well, that’s how people kick dirt around in this business. “He’s running as America’s pastor, so to speak, as he courts evangelicals in Iowa, and I think a lot of folks may wonder about his lack of a family.”
It seemed like a not-terribly-original attempt to stir up gossip among conservative voters about how an unmarried Republican candidate might be weird about women, or to raise questions about his sexuality within the party’s stubbornly homophobic factions. (And let’s just get this out of the way: This is not a wink-wink story that uses “single” in place of “gay.” Despite the retrograde assumptions people still like to make about wifeless men of a certain age, there really is nothing to suggest that Scott is anything other than a confirmed bachelor in the most literal sense of the phrase.)
I wasn’t interested in laundering innuendos for this Republican operative. At the same time, the whole exchange left me intrigued about how voter interest (or lack thereof) in Scott’s love life (or lack thereof) might illuminate the politics of marriage, family and masculinity in today’s GOP. Donald Trump scrambled the values of the “family values” party to such a degree that the base kept loving him despite the “locker-room talk” about grabbing women and the allegation — which Trump denies — that he had cheated on his third wife with a porn star.
And yet, for all the conventional wisdom that went out the door when Trump walked in, a long-held belief persists: that the absence of a wife and kids would make voters uneasy, especially the kind who vote in Republican primaries. Was that still true?
There is a legitimate public interest in the partner of any would-be president. A first lady in waiting is typically a close confidante whose values reflect on, and influence, a potential leader of the free world. If Scott and his mystery woman were still in the get-to-know-you phase, voters might feel the right to get to know her, too. Plus, a new relationship can be strange to navigate under ordinary circumstances, so what’s it like when one of the people is running for president?
I decided that, yes, I would try to figure out whether Tim Scott has a girlfriend.
But I would also investigate a deeper question: Does anybody care?
On a Tuesday morning in mid-August, Scott sat on an outdoor stage at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, discussing his thoughts on policies that allow parents to direct public funds to private schools (he’s for it) and China “spying on our kids” via TikTok (he’s against). While he spoke, DeCasper, his campaign manager, stood at the back of the crowd in a campaign T-shirt.
“Do you work for Tim Scott?” asked an 88-year-old man in a short-sleeved checkered button-up and a National Rifle Association cap.
The man was Max Hagen, a self-described “Fairaholic” who claimed to have shaken every president’s hand since Dwight D. Eisenhower.
“How come he doesn’t bring his wife and kids with him like all the other candidates do?” Hagen asked.
“Well,” DeCasper said, “that’s because he’s single.”
“He’s single?”
“He has a very lovely girlfriend.”
“How come he doesn’t bring her around?”
Frankly, the whole interaction was a bit on-the-nose. I had come to Iowa to try to get an idea of what people thought of his being a bachelor. DeCasper, who previously served as Scott’s chief of staff, had told me last year that, yes, there were times in his career when Scott had fretted about “the optics” of not having a spouse. More recently, however, she had told her boss not to worry about it. “Honey, it’s two-thousand-whatever, you’re fine,” she recalled saying to Scott. She had told me something similar last fall: “That’s old-school,” she’d said about needing a spouse to run for president. “We don’t operate that way anymore.”
It’s true that remaining single deep into adulthood is not as unusual as it used to be. In 1980, only 6 percent of 40-year-olds had never been married, according to Pew Research; in 2021, it was 25 percent. In politics, however, a family tableau remains core to “the optics.” The Republican primary field includes a conservative variety pack of Wife Guys — such as Ron DeSantis, who reportedly changed the way he pronounced his last name to the way his wife, Casey, preferred saying it, and Mike Pence, who reportedly won’t eat alone with a woman unless his wife, Karen, is also present. And although there have been unmarried candidates for president over the years — including the other Republican senator from South Carolina, Lindsey O. Graham, in 2015 — you would have to go all the way back to Grover Cleveland, in 1884, to find a bachelor who won. (Cleveland married two years later.) Before that, there was James Buchanan, who stayed single after winning in 1856. And yeah, it was a thing.
“An Old Bachelor is at most but a half man,” wrote the New York Evening Post in an editorial about Buchanan. “How can such a person make more than a half-President?”
Fast-forward to two-thousand-whatever. Despite an evolving understanding of gender — or, more likely, because of it — Republicans have made defining “masculinity” a part of their political playbook. This includes promoting some pretty old-school ideas about marriage.
“Men are meant to be husbands, to form the virtues of a husband in their souls,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) wrote in his book “Manhood.”
Before Trump, when Tim Miller was working in opposition research on the Republican side, finding a sex scandal used to be an effective way to topple an opponent. It may say something about our current political moment that Scott’s opponents might see an opportunity to damage him with a sexless scandal.
“What might be salient with Republican voters is not that he isn’t a perfect family man,” Miller told me, “but that he might not have the macho womanizing strength of the MAGA god-king.”
Scott’s current mission is to impress a particular subset of Republicans: the ones who will be participating in the Iowa caucuses early next year. What do they think of the idea of an unmarried, childless commander in chief?
“I think 10 or 20 years ago, people had a kind of romance with the first family,” said Bob Vander Plaats, the head of the Family Leader, a social conservative organization in Iowa. “But I think our country is at the point where being married isn’t the top qualifier. It probably doesn’t make the Top 50.”
Scott’s unmarriedness isn’t the only thing that distinguishes him from other Republicans who are trying to rise in the party. He is not a perpetually aggrieved, rhetorically aggressive culture-warrior type. He’s also a Black man who has spoken out against whitewashing America’s racial history and has experienced being stopped by the police frequently for offenses such as, as he put it in 2016, “driving a new car in the wrong neighborhood.”
At the same time, Scott does not believe there is systemic racism in America today, and lately he has been talking a lot about “backing the blue,” locking up violent criminals, securing the southern border and implementing a federal ban on abortions after the 15th week of a pregnancy, “at a minimum.”
When I asked Steve Deace, a conservative talk-show host from Iowa, about how Scott’s marital status plays into everything, Deace predicted that Republican voters aren’t going to evaluate the candidate on that factor alone — but that it could work against him if he doesn’t measure up in other ways.
“In the end, someone who is unmarried, hasn’t been part of a meaningful conservative fight and was on the wrong side of virtually every flash point in the last cycle just won’t pass muster,” he said. “If he were polling in double digits in November, there would be a super PAC running ads in Iowa pointing this stuff out.” (Scott is polling at 9 percent in the state, per an August poll by the respected Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer.)
For now, many of the Republicans checking out Scott at the Iowa fair didn’t really seem to specifically care that Scott was single.
“What matters to me is that he’s in favor of putting the family unit back together,” said Brian Heck, 60. “I’d be more worried about him having a bunch of illegitimate kids than having no kids.”
A Republican voter is worried about a black man having a bunch of illegitimate kids.
Is that just too fucking perfect or what?
“I wouldn’t want someone to bring their children to the White House. That’s no place for them,” said Connie Hoksbergen, 57.
“I think it will just be less distracting,” said Greg Pollak, a pastor from Altoona, noting the drama that has lately swirled around presidential offspring. “It seems like the family have been a problem these past several years. I could even see it being an advantage.”
Scott’s parents didn’t have a marriage worth aspiring to. In his memoir, “America: A Redemption Story,” Scott writes that his father was a mercurial man who suffered mental trauma while serving in Vietnam, and whose drinking and tirades drove his mother — along with Scott and his older brother — out of the house.
As a teenager, Scott found a father figure in a man named John Moniz, the owner of a Chick-fil-A franchise, who mentored Scott and taught him about conservative values. Scott was a charmer, even back then, according to Brian Moniz, John’s son and Scott’s friend since childhood. Scott and the younger Moniz used to spend a lot of time hanging around the mall and flirting with girls.
“He’s always had a way with the ladies,” Moniz said.
I’ve seen Scott flirt. It was 2012, and we were having lunch at Clyde’s in downtown Washington. A waitress came up and put her hand on his freshly shaved (and perspiring) head.
“I think you’re hot,” she told him. “I can feel your heat from over here.”
“Most people say I’m hot,” Scott said. “I agree.”
A few days after that, I asked Scott whether he was still a virgin.
The question wasn’t quite as prurient as it might sound. I had been assigned to write an article about Scott, then a freshman member of Congress, for National Journal. In my research, I’d found a 1995 interview he’d done with the Charleston Post and Courier in which he’d discussed speaking to students about the importance of abstinence until marriage. “Talking to teens and college students about sexual purity is a hot ticket for me because I’m single,” Scott, then a 30-year-old city councilman, had told the paper. “I know what it means to struggle on the issue of sex. But it’s worth the wait.” Seventeen years later, he was still unmarried, and sex education was a political issue, so it seemed fair to ask whether the congressman — who, according to the same article, once drove a Nissan with a bumper sticker that said “True Love Waits” — practiced what he preached.
“Not as well as I did then,” he said, adding that he still believed sex before marriage was a “sin” and that he wished “we all had more patience.”
Around the time that article ran in National Journal, The Washington Post reported that Scott had taken the general manager of a Charleston lingerie store called Bits of Lace on a trip to an exclusive resort. Less than a year later, anonymous sources told a gossip blog that the two had broken up.
Since then, Scott has occasionally hinted at past and present girlfriends while never mentioning anyone by name, which only led to questions like this from CNN’s Dana Bash in 2017:
“What gives?” she asked about his unmarried status.
Scott then surprised Bash by offering an otherwise unreported tidbit: that he had once been engaged.
“I didn’t know that,” Bash said, to which Scott offered a deadpan reply: “Shhh, don’t tell anyone.”
Apparently nobody told Brian Moniz, the childhood friend.
“No, I don’t think he’s ever been engaged,” he said when I spoke to him in August.
As for any current girlfriend, Moniz said: “I am not aware of anyone at this time.”
Playing things close to the vest doesn’t necessarily play well with everyone. A few weeks ago, Axios reported that Scott’s privacy about his personal life was an issue with conservative donors who might otherwise consider backing his candidacy. “The joke has always been that he is secretly gay or something,” the unnamed operative told me. “I don’t really buy that. But he’s got an interesting history.” The dossier he’d sent included details about Scott having owned property and shared a jet ski with male friends.
Scott is not gay, DeCasper told me, and nobody who knows him suggested otherwise. But the rumor mill is lazy, and the “joke” about the senator’s sexuality still gets repeated. Early last year, for example, Matt Schlapp, the head of the Conservative Political Action Conference, asked me whom I thought Trump might choose as his 2024 running mate. When I mentioned Scott, Schlapp replied: “You think he picks a gay vice president?” (Incidentally, Schlapp, who is married with five kids, was later accused of unwanted groping by a male staffer on Herschel Walker’s Senate campaign. He has denied the allegations.)
According to Moniz, Scott’s bachelorhood is a simple case of being married to his job.
“It’s been a challenge, mainly for the females in his life over the years,” Moniz said. “They get put on the back burner. Women have hung around for a while, and they realize they’re not going to be the top priority right now.”
Bobby Harrell, who has been friends with Scott since the two served together in the South Carolina State House, told me that Scott talked often about how much he admired Harrell’s 44-year marriage and “wished for something like it someday.” In 2018, Scott told Politico that he wanted to have six(!) children once he found “Mrs. Right.”
“Every time my wife talks to him,” Al Jenkins, a longtime friend and current staffer, told me in 2020, “she says, ‘Who is she, and when are we going to meet her?’”
Now, three years later, I had the same questions. Six friends I spoke with said they didn’t know about a woman in his life. Others never returned my calls. The campaign, of course, was well aware that I was trying to get to the bottom of Scott’s love life. They were polite, but not exactly eager to spill.
Finally, with one debate out of the way and the end of summer approaching, Scott’s campaign did agree to make the principal available for a brief interview on the subject.
And so, two weeks ago, I flew to South Carolina to ask a 57-year-old presidential candidate whether he had a girlfriend.
“If I had my druthers, we wouldn’t be doing this,” Scott said.
We were sitting at a conference table at the DoubleTree hotel in North Charleston. Scott was looking sharp in a blue suit with no tie. His head was freshly shaved. A security guard stood sentry outside the door, and Scott was flanked by three different spokespeople. The whole thing felt a little like a one-man news conference, or perhaps a deposition. He came armed with talking points about how American voters cared about their own families, not about his family.
“I have been very protective of my family and my loved ones,” he told me. “I signed up for this. If we make it, she will be signing up for it as well, but at least then she’ll know what she’s getting into. But until then, the only conversation I’m going to have about her in any form or fashion is right now.”
For months, Scott explained, a friend from church had been trying to set him up with a woman the friend knew. Scott had told him that he wasn’t ready for a relationship. Then, late last year, the friend texted Scott the woman’s photo.
“You know what?” Scott recalled telling his friend after seeing the picture. “I’ve prayed on it. Tell me about her again?”
He got the woman’s number. They started talking, hitting it off with discussions about God and using a phone app to do a Bible study together. Scott said he loved her laugh. They had dinner at a downtown Charleston restaurant. She got the steak, he got the swordfish, and they shared even though, as Scott would later learn, she didn’t care for swordfish. They played pickleball, and Scott was embarrassed to find out that he was the “weak man on the court.”
He wouldn’t tell me her name, and the campaign declined to make her available to chat, even off the record. Technically I can’t verify that she exists, except to note that for a presidential campaign to essentially reverse-catfish America would be insane. (By way of corroboration, DeCasper offered that she’s personally hung out with her at the zoo.)
Scott said he had theories about why other campaigns might want to draw attention to his being single. It’s just a way to “sow seeds of doubt” about his campaign, he said, a way “to say that, ‘That guy isn’t one of us.’”
“It’s like a different form of discrimination or bias,” Scott said. “You can’t say I’m Black, because that would be terrible, so find something else that you can attack.”
Throwing himself into work was always kind of a defense mechanism, he said — a response to watching his parents’ marriage blow up when he was a child. “For me, it was the defining moment of my entire life,” he said. “It creates scar tissue. One thing you can do when that happens is run away or run toward something else. And I ran toward purpose.”
What, other than a photo and some prayerful reflection, might have made Scott decide to run toward a relationship at the same time as he’s running, harder than ever, toward his life’s purpose? A cynic would note that, when a person sets out to run for president, nearly everything they do in the lead-up to the election is done with a campaign in mind, and perhaps Scott thought finding a partner would help his candidacy.
As the interview came to a close, I half expected the door to the conference room to swing open, and for the mystery woman to waltz in for a dramatic reveal.
Then again, Scott isn’t the reality TV guy in the race.
“I can’t imagine dragging her onto the campaign trail unless I have the intention of marrying her,” he said. “I hope that happens, to be honest with you.”
He paused.
“I guess I should be careful about how I say that,” Scott said, with a sheepish grin. “Strike that comment.”
He laughed. His relationship and campaign were both new. It’s hard to know, this early, if any of this is real.
The Republican Conference in the US House of Representatives is what you get when you allow the radical libertarian anti-government hyper-individualist "philosophy" to run itself out to the logical extreme.
Marj and Bobo got after it pretty good on the House floor. No ripped pantyhose or hair-pulling or busted glasses though.
It doesn't look like much, but people within earshot have said it was pretty nasty.
It remains to be seen, of course, if the followers of either one will attack the other - rhetorically or bodily or whatever.
We might also look forward to a time when the "grownups" in GOP Leadership step up and try to tell these idiots they're doing harm to their own ambitions, and they ... nah, never mind.
But wait - what's this? Kevin McCarthy speaks.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is urging House Republicans to vote against a proposal from Representative Lauren Boebert this week.
Republicans have long made their dissatisfaction with President Joe Biden known, with some advocating for impeachment. Earlier this year, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced articles of impeachment, but Boebert took the threat a step further and introduced the articles of impeachment against Biden in a strategic way that would force a floor vote.
Some Republican officials expect the motion to worsen relationships in the Republican Party, and McCarthy is asking the legislators to vote down the proposal when it reaches the House floor.
Boebert announced the motion on Twitter on Tuesday, citing Biden's handling of the U.S.-Mexico border as the reason behind the articles of impeachment.
"The American people can no longer be subjected to a President who refuses to secure our borders. His open border agenda has put every American at greater risk, allowed human traffickers to thrive and given the cartel a free pass. He is not fit to remain as Commander in Chief," she tweeted.
But McCartney advised his party to vote against Boebert's proposal, urging them to bide their time and wait for the right moment before impeaching Biden.
According to a tweet from Punch Bowl News founder Jake Sherman, McCarthy suggested that by voting in favor of Boebert's proposal, House Republicans could lose the majority they just fought so hard to win. He reminded his colleagues that Republicans have taken back the House only five times in the past century: 1946, 1952, 1994, 2010 and 2022. "But the first 2 times, we lost it right away the next cycle. The second two times we held it for 12 and 8 years," he said, according to the tweet. "What majority do we want to be? Give it right back in 2 years or hold it for a decade and make real change. How are we going to censure [Representative] Adam Schiff for abusing his position to lie and force an impeachment and then turn around and do it ourselves the next day?"
Uh - 'scuse me, Kev - when did you start getting all ookie about Republicans looking like a buncha fuckin' hypocrites?
McCarthy reminded House Republicans that House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer is already investigating Biden, and if the investigation leads to articles of impeachment, then the House should vote to impeach.
Boebert's proposal also annoyed Greene, who allegedly called Boebert a "copycat" for offering a Biden impeachment resolution similar to the one she proposed, according to a tweet by CNN reporter Annie Grayer.
Boebert and Greene have disagreed in the past, such as when House Republicans finally voted in favor of McCarthy for speaker. McCarthy secured the position after 15 rounds of voting, with Greene voting in favor of McCarthy and Boebert voting against him.
Newsweek reported on Tuesday that one political science expert called Boebert's act a "political stunt, pure and simple."
"No one wants to be seen as sticking up for the White House or failing to go after the president. At the same time, they know that an impeachment vote is both substantively baseless and would backfire politically."
What does and doesn't amaze me is that people like Boebert and Greene seem to have no fucking clue how badly they're being manipulated by handlers and staffers who are puppeteering the fuck out of them - it's like they think they're actually smart enough and skilled enough to do this shit on their own.
If immigrants - and brown people and queer people and all those "other" people - are the threat Republicans love to say they are, then most of the really disgusting scum-suckers wouldn't be middle class white guys who rape and murder children, or gun freaks who think they can kill their way out of their problems.
This story raises questions in my fevered little brain - it's pretty disturbing and more than a little confusing:
Missing teens likely among 7 people found dead in Oklahoma, authorities say
Henryetta, Okla. — Authorities searching a rural Oklahoma property for two missing teenagers discovered the bodies of seven people Monday, including the suspected remains of the teens and a convicted sex offender who was sought along with them, the local sheriff said.
Okmulgee County Sheriff Eddy Rice said the state medical examiner will have to confirm the identities of the victims, but "we believe that we have found the persons." He said the bodies were believed to include those of 14-year-old Ivy Webster and 16-year-old Brittany Brewer, along with Jesse McFadden, the felon authorities had said the teens were traveling with.
"We are no longer looking," Rice said. "We believe to have found everything that we were seeking this morning. Our hearts go out to the families and friends, schoolmates and everyone else."
He declined to provide details of how they died or other details.
The bodies were found during a search near the town of Henryetta, a town of about 6,000 about 90 miles east of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation spokesman Gerald Davidson said.
A missing endangered person advisory was issued earlier in the day for the two teenagers but it was canceled Monday afternoon by the Oklahoma Highway Patrol.
The advisory for Webster and Brewer had said they were reportedly seen traveling with McFadden, who was on the state's sex offender registry. Oklahoma Department of Corrections prison records show McFadden was convicted of first-degree rape in 2003 and released in October 2020.
Court records show McFadden was scheduled to appear in court Monday for the start of a jury trial on charges of soliciting sexual conduct with a minor and possession of child pornography. A message left Monday evening with McFadden's attorney in that case wasn't immediately returned.
Brittany Brewer's father told CBS Tulsa affiliate KOTV that one of the bodies discovered was his daughter.
"Brittany was an outgoing person. She was actually selected to be Miss Henryetta ... coming up in July for this Miss National Miss pageant in Tulsa. And now she ain't gonna make it because she's dead. She's gone," Nathan Brewer said.
CBS Oklahoma City affiliate KWTV quotes him as saying he's in shock. "I'm lost. I'm really lost," he said. "End of school's fixing to be here, she ain't gonna be there. I mean, she's gone. I have five kids but she was like my sidekick. She helped me on the cars, she helped me everywhere, and she's gone."
At a Monday night vigil, Brewer told hundreds of people: "It's just a parent's worst nightmare, and I'm living it."
He said his daughter had aspired to be a teacher or a veterinarian.
Henryetta Public Schools posted on Facebook and its website that it is grieving over the loss of several of its students.
"Our hearts are hurting, and we have considered what would be best for our students in the coming days," the note said. Officials said school would be in session, and mental health professionals and clergy would be on hand to help counsel students. But they said they would understand if families want to keep their children home from school.
In a separate Okmulgee County case, the bodies of four men were found Oct. 14 in the Deep Fork River in Okmulgee, a town of around 11,000 people some 40 miles south of Tulsa. Joseph Kennedy, 68, is facing four counts of first-degree murder in that case.
I get the uncomfortable feeling that some very cynical social-engineering plutocrats are doing nefarious things in order to keep us shooting each other, so we don't start shooting them.
Why are Republicans meeting with mask-off neo-Nazis?
Without a peep from the Republican Owned Media . Not even mentioned in Google…
Republican congressman Matt Rosendale from Montana met with:
Ryan Sanchez, disgraced former marine and member of the Rise Above Movement - a neo-Nazi street gang prosecuted for their role in the deadly 2017 Charlottesville Nazi rally.
Pro-Hitler blogger Greyson Arnold, a white supremacist Groyper* and January 6th insurrectionist.
These are not mere far-right activists. These men support active calls for genocide against LGBTQ+, Black, and Jewish people in the United States.
* Groypers are a loose network of alt right figures who are vocal supporters of white supremacist and “America First” podcaster Nick Fuentes.
Patrick Casey, who heads the white supremacist American Identity Movement, is also a “lead” Groyper.
Groypers regularly confront mainstream conservative organizations like Turning Point USA (TPUSA) for failing to promote a truly “America First” agenda and for not being adequately “pro white.”
Many Groypers hold racist and antisemitic views.
Fuentes is careful to position the Groypers not as white supremacists but rather as “Christian conservatives” who oppose, among other things, immigration (undocumented and legal), globalism, gay and transgender rights and feminism.
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) exchanged harsh words on the House floor Tuesday night before the State of the Union began, with the Republican senator telling the freshman GOP lawmaker that he should not be in Congress.
As lawmakers and other guests were entering the chamber ahead of President Biden’s speech, Romney and Santos were spotted having a brief but tense conversation. Romney glared at Santos, who smiled slightly, nodded and seemed to dismiss Romney before continuing to greet others.
Romney later said that he told Santos — who has admitted to fabricating large swaths of his biography and whose campaign finances are under investigation — that he did not belong there. Santos is under investigation by the bipartisan House Ethics Committee and last month stepped down from his committee assignments.
“I didn’t expect that he’d be standing there trying to shake hands with every senator and the president of the United States,” Romney told reporters after Biden’s speech concluded Tuesday night, when asked why he had confronted Santos.
“Given the fact that [Santos is] under ethics investigation, he should be sitting in the back row and staying quiet instead of parading in front of the president and people coming into the room,” Romney added.
Romney said that Santos’s claims that he had “embellished” his record were absurd. “Look, embellishing is saying you got an A when you got an A-minus. Lying is saying you graduated from a college you didn’t even attend,” Romney said. “And he shouldn’t be in Congress. And they’re going to go through the process and hopefully get him out. But he shouldn’t be there and if he had any shame at all, he wouldn’t be there.”
Romney told reporters that Santos may have responded to him, but that he did not hear it on the House floor. After the State of the Union concluded, Santos lashed out at Romney on social media.
“Hey @MittRomney just a reminder that you will NEVER be PRESIDENT!” he posted to Twitter.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) later defended Santos, describing Romney’s words as “the rudest I’ve ever seen a human being be to another human being.”
Say what, Tom?
Romney, who was the Republican nominee for president in 2012, was the only Republican to stand and clap when Biden said unemployment was at a 50-year low Tuesday night, and applauded alongside Democrats at other points in Biden’s speech.
"...Republicans are calling on the party to step up its outreach, including by finding more Gen Z surrogates, engaging with young voters on social media platforms and speaking to issues those voters care about."
Republicans are good at pretending the problem is with the voters themselves, or with the GOP's difficulty in arguing their case - "We're just not getting thru to them..."
Bullshit.
Their policies suck. And they suck. And their arguments in favor of GOP policies will never be convincing for people whose friends are among those who the GOP is constantly telling them to hate.
Let's send the Boomers out to apply for jobs right now, going on the 50-year-old "advice" they've been trying to peddle young people, just to see how long it takes them to reach total emotional collapse.
But anyway,
GOP sounds alarm over struggles with Gen Z voters
Republicans are urging the party to do a better job engaging with young voters after the GOP saw Generation Z voters cast ballots by large margins for Democrats in the November midterms, making the difference in key congressional and gubernatorial races.
While the party has long struggled with attracting younger voters, the 2022 midterm elections underscored the extent to which those struggles are a liability for it. Now, Republicans are calling on the party to step up its outreach, including by finding more Gen Z surrogates, engaging with young voters on social media platforms and speaking to issues those voters care about.
“When you ignore people’s bread-and-butter concerns and their more cultural concerns, you can’t expect to win their votes. And we’re having a series of close elections, and the Republicans are just throwing away an entire demographic, and it’s costing them elections,” said veteran GOP strategist Keith Naughton.
An analysis by Tufts University’s Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) using day-after estimates suggests that voter turnout among 18- to 29-year-olds in 2022 was at the second highest of the last 30 years for a midterm election. In House races alone, the demographic favored Democratic candidates to Republicans 63 percent to 35 percent, remaining mostly consistent since 2020 but a slight drop from 2018, when the margin was 67 percent to 32 percent.
Overall, more than a quarter of voters between the ages of 18 and 29 are estimated to have cast a ballot during the November midterms, according to an analysis of Edison Research’s National Election Poll Survey by CIRCLE, often playing a critical role in battleground races.
David Morgan, a senior at Pennsylvania State University and the political director of the Penn State College Republicans, believes the GOP is facing challenges with young voters because they’re not speaking to social policies and issues.
“Better health care, LGBTQ rights, reproductive rights, stuff like that … climate change, those issues are huge for Gen Z. And because the party kind of is a little bit slow on the uptake initially with kind of some of these issues … I think it kind of automatically slanted our generation to go more towards Democrat,” he noted.
Other Republicans say the problem lies not only with the substance of their messaging but also with the method of communication.
“We have a tendency to do a lot of things wrong talking to younger voters. One is we don’t go to where they are,” said veteran GOP strategist John Brabender, noting how young voters are increasingly on TikTok.
“Our party says we can’t be on TikTok for privacy and security reasons,” he added. “Well, that’s great, but you better come up with an alternative really quickly, then, because we have a whole generation growing up with that being their number one news source yet we’re not talking to them there.”
CIRCLE’s analysis of AP VoteCast data and election results from other news outlets suggests that Gen Z voters and millennials were pivotal in deciding the most competitive elections. In the Arizona gubernatorial race, CIRCLE found 18- to 29-year-olds offered Democrat Katie Hobbs a net of 60,000 votes at a time when Hobbs was projected to win her race by just a third of that.
And in the Georgia Senate race, CIRCLE’s analysis found that Sen. Raphael Warnock (D) received a net of 116,000 votes from that demographic in the general election. Warnock placed first over Republican Herschel Walker during the November election by about 37,000 votes. The race later went to a runoff, which Warnock won.
“It’s a very secular cohort, and it’s a very progressive cohort on social issues. Very tolerant, firmly believe in LGBTQ rights, firmly believe that gender is not binary, very concerned about climate change … very concerned about gun violence, [which] they see as their generations’ issue, so the issues have really favored the Democrats,” said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, who worked on President Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign.
Lake suggested that voters between the ages of 18 and 29 years old are at odds with former President Trump and his ideology while noting that “they’re not necessarily that happy with the Democrats. They think the Democrats are often not producing, but two-thirds strongly believe in a role for government.”
Former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R), who serves as president for Young America’s Foundation, argues that “liberal indoctrination” — the idea that young voters are not often introduced to multiple schools of thought on issues, including views considered right of center — is at least partly responsible for the party’s challenges.
“Any of the consultant class in Washington who thinks just more clever digital ads or some sort of student coalition is going to make the difference I think don’t realize what they’re up against,” Walker said.
Some Republicans see an opportunity in the latest election results. Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for the conservative Turning Point Action, noted in exit polling published by CNN that 61 percent of those aged 18 to 24 years old voted for Democrats, slightly fewer than the 65 percent of 25- to 29-year-olds who voted for the party.
Meanwhile, 63 percent of voters aged 18 to 29 voted Democrat in 2022, compared to 35 percent who voted for the GOP. That suggests a slight dip for both of those demographics compared to 2018, when 67 percent of that same demographic voted Democratic compared to 32 percent voting for the GOP.
Of course, those figures still underscore the difficulties the GOP faces with young people. And while members see this as an issue that stretches back some time, Republicans say it’s one that requires devoted infrastructure toward tackling that age gap.
“Not trying to throw the RNC [Republican National Committee] under the bus here, but there’s so much focus on fundraising I think within the Republican Party because we do not effectively raise and we do not effectively spend that there is an unhealthy imbalance on one specific type of voter and that those are the people who meet that cross section of the ones that we need to turn out and also the ones that have money to do it,” said Tyler Bowyer, the chief operating officer of Turning Point Action who also serves as an RNC National Committeeman in Arizona.
“You have the old guard trying to raise money for baby boomers, and you have millennial/Gen Z, which is like this massive bucket, now the biggest part of the electorate that we have to focus on, and we don’t have enough people, we don’t have enough money in that group to make it worth it to the old guard. And we don’t have enough know-how and experience in how to message those people,” Bowyer, who is a millennial, continued.
“So it’s an opportunity for us moving forward, but it’s gonna take some real innovative leadership to look at this and say, ‘Hey, we need to do more work in the influencer space, and we need to do more work in the social media space. We need to do more work in how we message and who’s delivering the message,’ ” he said.
Josh Hawley's running for president (I'm pretty sure), and as much as I'm loath even to appear as if I'm carrying water, or a message, or anything other than a burning dislike for Mr Hawley, I had to post his Op/Ed because this is a Burn The Lifeboats moment if ever there was one.
Also - you're all over the fuckin' map here, Joshie.
eg: you say you wanna boost American wage-earners, and save people money, but then you're against lifting tariffs - which are nothing more than a "value added" tax (ie: pass every penny of the cost along to the consumer), and it falls hardest on middle- working- and lower class Americans. You know - the ones you say you wanna help, and should be listening to, while China feels practically no pain at all.
(pay wall)
Opinion by Josh Hawley
The GOP is dead. A new GOP must listen to working people.
The old Republican Party is dead. It has been wasting away for years now, and this month’s midterm results are the finishing blow. If Republicans learn nothing else from this election, they must learn that much.
As frustrating as the election outcomes are, the death of the old GOP is no reason to mourn. It just means that it’s time for Republicans to forge something new — a party that truly represents the cultural backbone of this nation: America’s working people.
Many Republicans are primed to learn all the wrong lessons from this cycle. Over the past week, we’ve heard this election is about nothing more than “candidate quality” or turnout operations.
Wrong. The problem isn’t principally the tactics; the problem is the substance. For the past two years, the Republican establishment in Washington has capitulated on issue after issue, caving to Democrats on the Second Amendment and on the left’s radical climate agenda (“infrastructure”). These Republican politicians sided with Big Pharma on insulin and advocated lowering tariffs on our competitors overseas.
Then they wonder why working-class independents have little enthusiasm about voting Republican.
For decades, Republican politicians have sung a familiar tune. On economics, they have cut taxes on the big corporations and talked about changing Social Security and Medicare — George W. Bush even tried to partially privatize Social Security back in 2005. In the name of “growth,” these same Republicans have supported ruinous trade policies — such as admitting China to the World Trade Organization — that have collapsed American industry and driven down American wages.
This tax-and-trade agenda has hollowed out too many American towns by shipping jobs overseas. It has made it almost impossible to raise a family on one income and to find a good-paying job that doesn’t require a college degree. Our trade deficit with China has cost this country 3.7 million good jobs, while a crisis of drug overdose deaths — particularly among working Americans — has ravaged many of the same communities that have suffered most from deindustrialization. It has all made it harder to stay rooted in your hometown or region. That’s not a record of success.
Republican politicians have frequently advocated higher immigration levels and four years ago went all in for soft-on-crime “sentencing reform.” They have done nothing on Big Tech. This record doesn’t appeal to working people. Just the opposite: It repels them. If Republicans want to be a majority party, now is the time to change course.
Republicans will only secure the generational victories they crave when they come to terms with this reality: They must persuade a critical mass of working class voters that the GOP truly represents their interests and protects their culture. The red wave didn’t land in part because voters who cast a ballot for Barack Obama and later supported Donald Trump — voters who likely disapprove of Joe Biden and the Democrats’ agenda — chose to stay home.
Republicans must win these voters. We will not be a majority without them. That means waking up to what they care about. Work, family and culture are the touchstones of meaning for working people across the country. They must form the bedrock of a new party agenda.
We can start by stopping the bleeding. No more talk of grand bargains that turbocharge illegal immigration. No more liberalizing the United States’ trade agenda, making us more dependent on foreign adversaries. No more fiddling with Social Security in the guise of “entitlement reform.” All that should be clear enough.
But beyond this, it’s time for proactive policymaking. No nation ever got strong by consuming stuff other people make. We need an economy that produces critical goods here, in this country, and creates good-paying jobs for working people. That means tariffs to foster American industry, local content requirements to reshore manufacturing, and taking the shackles off U.S. energy producers. That means new antitrust laws for Big Tech that will bust up monopolies such as Google and restore competition to the marketplace. And while we’re at it, we should start relocating federal agencies such as the Departments of Energy, Interior and Agriculture to middle America. It’s long past time for cosseted policymakers to confront the real-world consequences of their decisions, economic or otherwise.
We need explicit support in our tax code for marriage and family, such as a parent tax credit for working families. We should adopt new protections for parents to ensure they control their children’s education and medical care, such as a Parents’ Bill of Rights. And families can’t thrive unless they are safe. That’s why we need 100,000 new police officers on the streets, spread across every state in America.
Right now, the Republican Party stands at a crossroads. Its leaders can, of course, attempt to resurrect the dead consensus of offshoring, amnesties and “free trade.” That’s the path to further losses.
A reborn Republican Party must look very different. It must offer good jobs and good lives, not just higher stock prices for Wall Street. And it must place working Americans at its heart and take them as they are, rather than treating them as resources to be exploited or engineered away.
That’s the way to victory. That’s the way to national renewal.
This is warmed-over Fortress America Isolationist bullshit dressed up in flowery rhetoric that still means mostly nothing.
And don't ever forget who - or what - this little prick is.
It's been said, and it bears repeating: The fact that Marjorie Taylor Greene is a leader in the GOP is a very bad sign that should motivate everybody with a living thinking brain to do whatever it takes to stop this nonsense.
If there's any good news here, it's only that the percentage of Republicans voicing approval for freaks like Greene indicates that freaks are about all that's left in that party.
That's right - the "good news" is that one of the two main political parties here in USAmerica Inc has been taken over by the kind of booger-eatin' morons who vote for demagogues and dead pimps every chance they get, just to stick it to the libs.
(pay wall)
Welcome home, Marjorie Taylor Greene
The first time The Washington Post wrote about Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) was in the context of what made her exceptional: She was an avowed adherent of QAnon. And not just of the this guy Q has some interesting thoughts variety; rather, Greene celebrated that “there’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles out” with Donald Trump in the White House.
This was June 2020, and Greene had simply made it to the runoff in the Republican primary. The article was caveated with ifs about winning the primary and then the general, but it was clear what path she was on. Reporter Colby Itkowitz contacted members of the Republican leadership — including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) and the conference’s chair, Liz Cheney (Wyo.) — but they weren’t interested in offering comment.
What seemed to be afoot was that the Republican House caucus was adding another member to its fringe, someone who’d occasionally make headlines for saying something embarrassing or introducing some weird, doomed piece of legislation. That sense was probably reinforced when Greene, as a new member of the chamber, quickly generated headlines for past comments about leading Democrats; the Democratic majority stripped her of any committee assignments, moving her from backbench to no bench.
But that was not the path Greene was destined to follow. Past members of the right-wing fringe who earned spots in Congress responded largely by folding into the white noise of the legislative process. Perhaps in part because Greene so explicitly had no part in that process — or, more likely, because she never had any interest in it in the first place — Greene helped create a new style of fringe Republican legislator. She wasn’t former Texas congressman Ron Paul (R) wanting to eradicate the Federal Reserve and she wasn’t former Iowa congressman Steve King (R) advocating hard-line immigration policies well before Trump. She understood that the platform had more value for communications purposes than legislative ones.
In essence, election to Congress simply gave Greene a louder megaphone to attack the aforementioned cabal (even if she described them differently now). It allowed her to join her power with other fringe House members, such as Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), to engage in an effort that’s equal parts trolling and exaggeration. Trump loved Greene from the outset, and her unwavering fealty to him has earned her the ability to hitch herself to him repeatedly. Trump rallies now regularly feature speeches from the first-term congresswoman from rural Georgia.
This is not because she is broadly popular. YouGov recently conducted polling for the Economist that asked people to evaluate a range of Republicans, from members of the media to politicians. Trump was the most popular among Republicans, followed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Fox News’s Tucker Carlson. Far fewer Republicans have an opinion of Greene than those more-famous names, but even if we adjust the responses, evaluating favorability just among those with an opinion, Greene was seventh of seven.
Yet, as the Associated Press reported Monday, Greene has been increasingly welcomed back into the mix with the Republican establishment. When McCarthy announced the party’s midterm agenda in Pennsylvania last month, Greene was seated right behind him.
“Greene’s political currency stretches beyond her massive social media following and her ability to rake in sizable sums from donors,” the AP’s Lisa Mascaro reported. “Her proximity to Trump makes her a force that cannot be ignored by what’s left of her mainstream GOP colleagues.”
This is the point: She may not be broadly popular or influential, but she is influential in a place that other Republicans aren’t. She’s popular with a set of Republicans who are antagonistic to people such as Kevin McCarthy.
It’s not entirely clear that McCarthy is extending an olive branch to the fringe. It’s that he can’t afford to let the fringe agitate at the fringe. In the minority (though perhaps not exclusively then), there’s more power in Greene’s approach to serving in the House — shouting into microphones and maintaining an omnipresence in conservative media — than in simply trying to come up with doomed legislation. Greene has some of that, certainly, but it’s often the case that she uses the policy documents to boost her media position and not the opposite. (She’s offered up innumerable impeachment articles, including several targeting President Biden.)
McCarthy, of course, has his own ambitions. If Republicans regain the majority in November, he’d like to be speaker of the House. Allying with Greene and Gaetz and that cadre of legislators will make such an ascension more likely. But it means that his party again shifts to the right, as it has over and over since at least 2010. In 2011, after the tea party wave brought a new contingent of conservatives to Washington, the New York Times profiled McCarthy’s tricky job in corralling their votes as majority whip. That’s still his job today but with a frequently more-extreme caucus. (And spotty success.)
Cheney, freed from the shackles of protecting the Republican caucus, is no longer refraining from comment on Greene. In August, she said she’d rather work with Democrats than with Greene. Of course, by that point she was freed of political shackles entirely, having lost her bid for reelection to a Trump-endorsed Republican primary opponent.
When she was conference chair, Cheney would often stand behind McCarthy as he spoke to the media. Cheney is no longer behind McCarthy. Greene is; her time in exile is coming to an end.
Consider the shift just since 2020. In two years’ time, who will be standing in the background as the leader of the GOP makes an announcement about policy and direction? More importantly, who will the leader be who is making the announcement?
Stupid GOP policies are about to create a metric fuck ton of "welfare babies", and we're supposed to believe that Republicans are having a Scrooge-On-Christmas-Morning moment, so now they'll open up the government coffers and fund the necessary infrastructure to provide support for all the newly minted poor and brown people they love so much.
Fat fucking chance.
It's another lie. When I listen closely, I hear the coded "cha-ching" language of privatization and the move to funnel public funds into sectarian enterprises.
We didn't raise enough of a stink about GW Bush's "Faith-Based Initiatives" bullshit, and this year, SCOTUS has further paved the way by allowing tax dollars to be paid out to religious schools.
"Entitlements" are things to which we are entitled.
It's a tribute to Republican efforts over the last 40 years that they've managed to take a fairly simple concept like "this is mine - I've paid for it my entire life - I'm entitled to it", and turned it into an indictment for being greedy and undeserving, even as they've raised to the point of exultation the corporations and corporate captains - who haven't paid in - who haven't earned it - who are in fact unworthy.
But that's part of Daddy State strategy - it's what they do.
Their lying and their constant gaslighting are aimed at tearing down our self-confidence, making us think we're wrong to demand what's rightfully ours.
MeidasTouch:
Don't think for a minute this isn't a rehash of their stoopid little scheme to privatize everything in sight.
They want to hand Social Security over to Wall Street, and then kill Medicare by shifting it to a voucher system, which is basically nothing more than a book of coupons for Senior Discounts at your favorite Doc-in-a-Box.
