Showing posts with label stupid politician tricks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stupid politician tricks. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 06, 2023
Tuesday, September 05, 2023
Fuckin' Republicans
But rhetorically or politically? Gladly. Con brio, amigo.
What Tuberville is doing - what every Republican supports - is not "playing hardball". It's hostage-taking. It's roadblocks at the state line, and detaining every woman until she proves she's not pregnant, or "abortion trafficking."
The GOP is ugly and fucked up in the head.
Three service secretaries to Tuberville: Stop this dangerous hold on senior officers
As the civilian leaders of the Navy, Air Force, Space Force and Army, we are proud to work alongside exceptional military leaders who are skilled, motivated and empowered to protect our national security.
These officers and the millions of service members they lead are the foundation of America’s enduring military advantage. Yet this foundation is being actively eroded by the actions of a single U.S. senator, Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), who is blocking the confirmation of our most senior military officers.
The senator asserts that this blanket and unprecedented “hold,” which he has maintained for more than six months, is about opposition to Defense Department policies that ensure service members and their families have access to reproductive health no matter where they are stationed.
After the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, this policy is critical and necessary to meet our obligations to the force. It is also fully within the law, as confirmed by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.
Senators have many legislative and oversight tools to show their opposition to a specific policy. They are free to introduce legislation, gather support for that legislation and pass it. But placing a blanket hold on all general and flag officer nominees, who as apolitical officials have traditionally been exempt from the hold process, is unfair to these military leaders and their families.
And it is putting our national security at risk.
Thus far, the hold has prevented the Defense Department from placing almost 300 of our most experienced and battle-tested leaders into critical posts around the world.
Three of our five military branches — the Army, Navy and Marine Corps — have no Senate-confirmed service chief in place. Instead, these jobs — and dozens of others across the force — are being performed by acting officials without the full range of legal authorities necessary to make the decisions that will sustain the United States’ military edge.
Across the services, many generals and admirals are being forced to perform two roles simultaneously. The strain of this double duty places a real and unfair burden on these officers, the organizations they lead and their families.
The blanket hold is also exacting a personal toll on those who least deserve it.
Each of us has seen the stress this hold is inflicting up and down the chain of command, whether in the halls of the Pentagon or at bases and outposts around the world.
We know officers who have incurred significant unforeseen expenses and are facing genuine financial stress because they have had to relocate their families or unexpectedly maintain two residences.
Military spouses who have worked to build careers of their own are unable to look for jobs because they don’t know when or if they will move. Children haven’t known where they will go to school, which is particularly hard given how frequently military children change schools already.
These military leaders are being forced to endure costly separations from their families — a painful experience they have come to know from nearly 20 years of deployments to places such as Iraq and Afghanistan.
All because of the actions of a single senator.
Any claim that holding up the promotions of top officers does not directly damage the military is wrong — plain and simple.
The leaders whose lives and careers are on hold include scores of combat veterans who have led our troops into deadly combat with valor and distinction in the decades since 9/11. These men and women each have decades of experience and are exactly who we want — and need — to be leading our military at such a critical period of time.
The impact of this hold does not stop at these officers or their family members.
With the promotions of our most senior leaders on hold, there is a domino effect upending the lives of our more junior officers, too.
Looking over the horizon, the prolonged uncertainty and political battles over these military nominations will have a corrosive effect on the force.
The generals and admirals who will be leading our forces a decade from now are colonels and captains today. They are watching this spectacle and might conclude that their service at the highest ranks of our military is no longer valued by members of Congress or, by extension, the American public.
Rather than continue making sacrifices to serve our nation, some might leave uniformed service for other opportunities, robbing the Defense Department of talent cultivated over decades that we now need most to maintain our superiority over our rivals and adversaries.
Throughout our careers in national security, we have deeply valued the bipartisan support shown for our service members and their families. But rather than seeking a resolution to this impasse in that spirit, Tuberville has suggested he is going to further escalate this confrontation by launching baseless political attacks against these men and women.
We believe that the vast majority of senators and of Americans across the political spectrum recognize the stakes of this moment and the dangers of politicizing our military leaders. It is time to lift this dangerous hold and confirm our senior military leaders.
These officers and the millions of service members they lead are the foundation of America’s enduring military advantage. Yet this foundation is being actively eroded by the actions of a single U.S. senator, Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), who is blocking the confirmation of our most senior military officers.
The senator asserts that this blanket and unprecedented “hold,” which he has maintained for more than six months, is about opposition to Defense Department policies that ensure service members and their families have access to reproductive health no matter where they are stationed.
After the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, this policy is critical and necessary to meet our obligations to the force. It is also fully within the law, as confirmed by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.
Senators have many legislative and oversight tools to show their opposition to a specific policy. They are free to introduce legislation, gather support for that legislation and pass it. But placing a blanket hold on all general and flag officer nominees, who as apolitical officials have traditionally been exempt from the hold process, is unfair to these military leaders and their families.
And it is putting our national security at risk.
Thus far, the hold has prevented the Defense Department from placing almost 300 of our most experienced and battle-tested leaders into critical posts around the world.
Three of our five military branches — the Army, Navy and Marine Corps — have no Senate-confirmed service chief in place. Instead, these jobs — and dozens of others across the force — are being performed by acting officials without the full range of legal authorities necessary to make the decisions that will sustain the United States’ military edge.
Across the services, many generals and admirals are being forced to perform two roles simultaneously. The strain of this double duty places a real and unfair burden on these officers, the organizations they lead and their families.
The blanket hold is also exacting a personal toll on those who least deserve it.
Each of us has seen the stress this hold is inflicting up and down the chain of command, whether in the halls of the Pentagon or at bases and outposts around the world.
We know officers who have incurred significant unforeseen expenses and are facing genuine financial stress because they have had to relocate their families or unexpectedly maintain two residences.
Military spouses who have worked to build careers of their own are unable to look for jobs because they don’t know when or if they will move. Children haven’t known where they will go to school, which is particularly hard given how frequently military children change schools already.
These military leaders are being forced to endure costly separations from their families — a painful experience they have come to know from nearly 20 years of deployments to places such as Iraq and Afghanistan.
All because of the actions of a single senator.
Any claim that holding up the promotions of top officers does not directly damage the military is wrong — plain and simple.
The leaders whose lives and careers are on hold include scores of combat veterans who have led our troops into deadly combat with valor and distinction in the decades since 9/11. These men and women each have decades of experience and are exactly who we want — and need — to be leading our military at such a critical period of time.
The impact of this hold does not stop at these officers or their family members.
With the promotions of our most senior leaders on hold, there is a domino effect upending the lives of our more junior officers, too.
Looking over the horizon, the prolonged uncertainty and political battles over these military nominations will have a corrosive effect on the force.
The generals and admirals who will be leading our forces a decade from now are colonels and captains today. They are watching this spectacle and might conclude that their service at the highest ranks of our military is no longer valued by members of Congress or, by extension, the American public.
Rather than continue making sacrifices to serve our nation, some might leave uniformed service for other opportunities, robbing the Defense Department of talent cultivated over decades that we now need most to maintain our superiority over our rivals and adversaries.
Throughout our careers in national security, we have deeply valued the bipartisan support shown for our service members and their families. But rather than seeking a resolution to this impasse in that spirit, Tuberville has suggested he is going to further escalate this confrontation by launching baseless political attacks against these men and women.
We believe that the vast majority of senators and of Americans across the political spectrum recognize the stakes of this moment and the dangers of politicizing our military leaders. It is time to lift this dangerous hold and confirm our senior military leaders.
Friday, September 01, 2023
On Political Honesty
Finding one of those now is less likely than finding a verifiable video of bigfoot disembarking an alien spaceship riding a unicorn.
But once upon a time, we could count on politicians having enough honor to feel at least a might bit sheepish when caught in an outright lie.
Doesn't matter anymore. Not when 50 million of us are actually proud of just how far out of our way we're willing to go to stay ignorant.
So we get guys like Vivek Ramaswami.
The Articulate Ignorance of Vivek Ramaswamy
As our nation continues its march to 2024, a year that will feature not only a presidential election but also potentially four criminal trials of the Republican front-runner, I’ve been thinking about the political and cultural power of leadership. How much do leaders matter, really? What role does corrupt political leadership play in degrading not just a government but the culture itself?
Let’s talk today about the specific way in which poor leadership transforms civic ignorance from a problem into a crisis — a crisis that can have catastrophic effects on the nation and, ultimately, the world.
Civic ignorance is a very old American problem. If you spend five seconds researching what Americans know about their own history and their own government, you’ll uncover an avalanche of troubling research, much of it dating back decades. As Samuel Goldman detailed two years ago, as far back as 1943, 77 percent of Americans knew essentially nothing about the Bill of Rights, and in 1952 only 19 percent could name the three branches of government.
That number rose to a still dispiriting 38 percent in 2011, a year in which almost twice as many Americans knew that Randy Jackson was a judge on “American Idol” as knew that John Roberts was the chief justice of the United States. A 2018 survey found that most Americans couldn’t pass the U.S. Citizenship Test. Among other failings, most respondents couldn’t identify which nations the United States fought in World War II and didn’t know how many justices sat on the Supreme Court.
Civic ignorance isn’t confined to U.S. history or the Constitution. Voters are also wildly ignorant about one another. A 2015 survey found that Democrats believe Republicans are far older, far wealthier and more Southern than they truly are. Republicans believe Democrats are far more atheist, Black and gay than the numbers indicate.
But I don’t share these statistics to write yet another story bemoaning public ignorance. Instead, I’m sharing these statistics to make a different argument: that the combination of civic ignorance, corrupt leadership and partisan animosity means that the chickens are finally coming home to roost. We’re finally truly feeling the consequences of having a public disconnected from political reality.
Simply put, civic ignorance was a serious but manageable problem, as long as our leader class and key institutions still broadly, if imperfectly, cared about truth and knowledge — and as long as our citizens cared about the opinions of that leader class and those institutions.
Consider, for example, one of the most consequential gaffes in presidential debate history. In October 1976, the Republican Gerald Ford, who was then the president, told a debate audience, “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.”
The statement wasn’t just wrong, it was wildly wrong. Of course there was Soviet domination of Eastern Europe — a domination that was violently reaffirmed in the 1956 crackdown in Hungary and the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. The best defense that Ford’s team could muster was the national security adviser Brent Scowcroft’s argument that “I think what the president was trying to say is that we do not recognize Soviet domination of Europe.”
In a close election with Jimmy Carter, the gaffe was a big deal. As the political scientist Larry Sabato later wrote, the press “pounced” and “wrote of little else for days afterward.” As a result, “a public initially convinced that Ford had won the debate soon turned overwhelmingly against him.” Note the process: Ford made a mistake, even his own team recognized the mistake and tried to offer a plausible alternative meaning, and then press coverage of the mistake made an impression on the public.
Now let’s fast-forward to the present moment. Instead of offering a plausible explanation for their mistakes — much less apologizing — all too many politicians deny that they’ve made any mistakes at all. They double down. They triple down. They claim that the fact-checking process itself is biased, the press is against them and they are the real truth tellers.
I bring this up not just because of the obvious example of Donald Trump and many of his most devoted followers in Congress but also because of the surprising success of his cunning imitator Vivek Ramaswamy. If you watched the first Republican debate last week or if you’ve listened to more than five minutes of Ramaswamy’s commentary, you’ll immediately note that he is exceptionally articulate but also woefully ignorant, or feigning ignorance, about public affairs. Despite his confident delivery, a great deal of what he says makes no sense whatsoever.
As The Times has documented in detail, Ramaswamy is prone to denying his own words. But his problem is greater than simple dishonesty. Take his response to the question of whether Mike Pence did the right thing when he certified the presidential election on Jan. 6, 2021. Ramaswamy claims that in exchange for certification, he would have pushed for a new federal law to mandate single-day voting, paper ballots and voter identification. Hang on. Who would write the bill? How would it pass a Democratic House and a practically tied Senate? Who would be president during the intervening weeks or months?
It’s a crazy, illegal, unworkable idea on every level. But that kind of fantastical thinking is par for the course for Ramaswamy. This year, for instance, he told Don Lemon on CNN, “Black people secured their freedoms after the Civil War — it is a historical fact, Don, just study it — only after their Second Amendment rights were secured.”
Wait. What?
While there are certainly Black Americans who used weapons to defend themselves in isolated instances, the movement that finally ended Jim Crow rested on a philosophy of nonviolence, not the exercise of Second Amendment rights. The notion is utterly absurd. If anything, armed Black protesters such as the Black Panthers triggered cries for stronger gun control laws, not looser ones. Indeed, there is such a long record of racist gun laws that it’s far more accurate to say that Black Americans secured greater freedom in spite of a racist Second Amendment consensus, not because of gun rights.
Ramaswamy’s rhetoric is littered with these moments. He’s a very smart man, blessed with superior communication skills, yet he constantly exposes his ignorance, his cynicism or both. He says he’ll “freeze” the lines of control in the Ukraine war (permitting Russia to keep the ground it’s captured), refuse to admit Ukraine to NATO and persuade Russia to end its alliance with China. He says he’ll agree to defend Taiwan only until 2028, when there is more domestic chip manufacturing capacity here in the States. He says he’ll likely fire at least half the federal work force and will get away with it because he believes civil service protections are unconstitutional.
The questions almost ask themselves. How will he ensure that Russia severs its relationship with China? How will he maintain stability with a weakened Ukraine and a NATO alliance that just watched its most powerful partner capitulate to Russia? How will Taiwan respond during its countdown to inevitable invasion? And putting aside for a moment the constitutional questions, his pledge to terminate half the federal work force carries massive, obvious perils, beginning with the question of what to do with more than a million largely middle- and high-income workers who are now suddenly unemployed. How will they be taken care of? What will this gargantuan job dislocation do to the economy?
Ramaswamy’s bizarre solutions angered his debate opponents in Milwaukee, leading Nikki Haley to dismantle him on live television in an exchange that would have ended previous presidential campaigns. But the modern G.O.P. deemed him one of the night’s winners. A Washington Post/FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll found that 26 percent of respondents believed Ramaswamy won, compared with just 15 percent who believed Haley won.
The bottom line is this: When a political class still broadly believes in policing dishonesty, the nation can manage the negative effects of widespread civic ignorance. When the political class corrects itself, the people will tend to follow. But when key members of the political class abandon any pretense of knowledge or truth, a poorly informed public is simply unequipped to hold them to account.
And when you combine ignorance with unrelenting partisan hostility, the challenge grows all the greater. After all, it’s not as though members of the political class didn’t try to challenge Trump. But since that challenge came mostly from people Trump supporters loathe, such as Democratic politicians, members of the media and a few Trump-skeptical or Never Trump writers and politicians, their minds were closed. Because of the enormous amount of public ignorance, voters often didn’t know that Trump was lying or making fantastically unrealistic promises, and they shut out every voice that could tell them the truth.
In hindsight, I should have seen all this coming. I can remember feeling a sense of disquiet during the Tea Party revolution. Republican candidates were pledging to do things they simply could not do, such as repealing Obamacare without holding the presidency and Congress or, alternatively, veto-proof congressional majorities. Then, when they failed to do the thing they could never do in the first place, their voters felt betrayed.
There is always a problem of politicians overpromising. Matthew Yglesias recently reminded me of the frustrating way in which the 2020 Democratic primary contest was sidetracked by a series of arguments over phenomenally ambitious and frankly unrealistic policy proposals on taxes and health care. But there is a difference between this kind of routine political overpromising and the systematic mendacity of the Trump years.
A democracy needs an informed public and a basically honest political class. It can muddle through without one or the other, but when it loses both, the democratic experiment is in peril. A public that knows little except that it despises its opponents will be vulnerable to even the most bizarre conspiracy theories, as we saw after the 2020 election. And when leaders ruthlessly exploit that ignorance and animosity, the Republic can fracture. How long can we endure the consequences of millions of Americans believing the most fantastical lies?
Tuesday, May 16, 2023
Oy
Just when you think she's achieved Peak Stoopid, she scales the heights anew.
I looked it up - yes, it's real:
Friday, April 14, 2023
Sunday, April 02, 2023
Today's Face Palm
When you try to run your office in the US House of Representatives by having your staffers "inform" you by way of the comment section at some horseshit "conservative" website.
Wednesday, March 29, 2023
Today's Reddit
Why are so many Republicans such assholes about all this?
“We’re not gonna fix it” - Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) in regards to school shootings
by u/samfrench_ in facepalm
Tuesday, March 28, 2023
The Big Flop
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| House Oversight Committee Chair Rep. James Comer (R-KY) and Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) and Jim Jordan (R-OH) at a committee hearing on Capitol Hill on February 8. |
House Republicans are still looking for their next Benghazi. But their investigations are unpopular.
Christian Paz is a senior politics reporter at Vox, where he covers the Democratic Party. He joined Vox in 2022 after reporting on national and international politics for the Atlantic’s politics, global, and ideas teams, including the role of Latino voters in the 2020 election.
Even before they had taken control of the House, House Republicans were promising payback.
Using the powers of the various congressional committees that they would soon take over, ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus members, led by Reps. James Comer of Kentucky and Jim Jordan of Ohio, were pledging investigations of everything: the Biden family’s business practices, Hunter Biden’s laptop, the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, alleged government bias against conservatives, and the Biden administration’s border policies.
But so far, these investigations seem to be flopping. They don’t seem to be sticking in the public consciousness. They haven’t uncovered page one news about Hunter Biden’s laptop, or about the origins of Covid-19, or about a supposed government conspiracy to silence conservatives on Twitter. A bit more than two months into Republican control of the House, plenty of these investigations are well underway. Hearings have been held, letters sent, witnesses summoned, and hours spent appearing on Fox News.
The House GOP investigations also aren’t making the president’s reelection campaign untenable — many Democratic operatives suspected that was their goal — and they don’t seem to be damaging the president as many Republicans had hoped.
Of course, it’s still early, and in the more than year and a half before the 2024 presidential election, Republicans could still weaponize their committee investigations into better political cudgels. A handful of additional hearings are on the calendar, but more remain unscheduled. If Republicans had hoped to establish the same kind of cloud of confusion and innuendo that they did during the Obama years to tarnish the president’s reputation and hurt Hillary Clinton’s presidential hopes, they have yet to achieve that with Biden.
New polling provided to Vox by the progressive research group Navigator further demonstrates this trend: Half of American adults believe Republicans are overreaching in their oversight of the Biden administration, up from the 46 percent who said so in a February poll and the 30 percent who said so in January. The number who view the GOP’s investigations as a form of overreach is also rising among political independents, while Republican support for the investigations is remaining steady.
The president’s approval rating remains virtually unchanged (though it’s trended up since the midterms). House Republicans continue to be tremendously unpopular. And more Americans today see the House GOP’s oversight investigations negatively when compared to when they took control.
Americans’ feelings toward GOP oversight aren’t very positive
Even before they had taken control of the House, House Republicans were promising payback.
Using the powers of the various congressional committees that they would soon take over, ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus members, led by Reps. James Comer of Kentucky and Jim Jordan of Ohio, were pledging investigations of everything: the Biden family’s business practices, Hunter Biden’s laptop, the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, alleged government bias against conservatives, and the Biden administration’s border policies.
But so far, these investigations seem to be flopping. They don’t seem to be sticking in the public consciousness. They haven’t uncovered page one news about Hunter Biden’s laptop, or about the origins of Covid-19, or about a supposed government conspiracy to silence conservatives on Twitter. A bit more than two months into Republican control of the House, plenty of these investigations are well underway. Hearings have been held, letters sent, witnesses summoned, and hours spent appearing on Fox News.
The House GOP investigations also aren’t making the president’s reelection campaign untenable — many Democratic operatives suspected that was their goal — and they don’t seem to be damaging the president as many Republicans had hoped.
Of course, it’s still early, and in the more than year and a half before the 2024 presidential election, Republicans could still weaponize their committee investigations into better political cudgels. A handful of additional hearings are on the calendar, but more remain unscheduled. If Republicans had hoped to establish the same kind of cloud of confusion and innuendo that they did during the Obama years to tarnish the president’s reputation and hurt Hillary Clinton’s presidential hopes, they have yet to achieve that with Biden.
New polling provided to Vox by the progressive research group Navigator further demonstrates this trend: Half of American adults believe Republicans are overreaching in their oversight of the Biden administration, up from the 46 percent who said so in a February poll and the 30 percent who said so in January. The number who view the GOP’s investigations as a form of overreach is also rising among political independents, while Republican support for the investigations is remaining steady.
The president’s approval rating remains virtually unchanged (though it’s trended up since the midterms). House Republicans continue to be tremendously unpopular. And more Americans today see the House GOP’s oversight investigations negatively when compared to when they took control.
Americans’ feelings toward GOP oversight aren’t very positive
The big reason these investigations don’t seem to be breaking through is pretty simple: They just aren’t that popular, and never really were. And it’s not just Navigator’s polling that shows Americans aren’t very receptive to whatever comes out of these hearings. Since January, a series of Pew, NBC, and Public Policy Polling surveys have shown that most Americans don’t see these investigations as priorities for Congress, or would rather Republicans spend less time pursuing these lines of inquiry in favor of addressing more tangible, everyday issues (first among them being inflation and the cost of household goods).
For example, when Pew Research asked Americans in mid-January how they felt about the GOP’s new focus on investigating the Biden administration, the answers were pretty definitive — 65 percent worried Republicans would focus “too much,” while 32 percent thought they wouldn’t pay enough attention. Even Republicans were split closely; 42 percent of Republican adults said they thought Republicans would focus on oversight too much, compared to the 56 percent who feared lawmakers wouldn’t go far enough.
Navigator also found that a plurality of Americans don’t see these inquiries as serious, good-faith efforts at oversight — including 38 percent of independents who think they are “political stunts.”
Navigator’s chief of polling, Bryan Bennett, told me that in the runup to and aftermath of the midterms, Republicans may have misjudged just how much to play up their proposed investigations, and made a strategic error hyping up the investigations that are of least interest to Americans.
In Navigator voter focus groups in Wisconsin, Virginia, and Texas, voters seemed most open to investigations into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, China-US trade practices, and the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
But those aren’t the investigations that House Republicans have prioritized. The panel investigating the origins of the coronavirus, for example, has only met once, earlier in March, and a second hearing is scheduled for Tuesday (scrutinizing school closures). The Foreign Affairs Committee, which is investigating the Afghanistan withdrawal, meanwhile, has sent letters to the State Department requesting more information and held one hearing on the fall of Kabul, but it did not have any witnesses from the executive branch testifying. Meanwhile, James Comer, the chair of the oversight committee, has spent hours on Fox News pushing the committee’s investigation into Hunter Biden’s laptop and the Biden family’s business practices. They’ve held one hearing already and have more planned.
These hearing topics, Bennett said, are the ones that independent voters are most likely to view with disdain and distrust. “The reasons that were cited for that included that there was kind of this broad perception that it was seen as being like a revenge list or a tit-for-tat, or a ‘get even’ list, and that it wasn’t really particularly focused on … the priorities that people want Congress to focus on.”
Comer has also managed to become Republicans’ standard-bearer for investigations, assuming the role of chief White House congressional antagonist on Fox News, Newsmax, and One America News. But the decision to take on that role also poses a problem — not many people know him outside of conservative circles, and scrutiny into his past has dredged up old allegations of abuse of a girlfriend and a shady track record of political maneuvering. (Comer’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)
Why the GOP’s investigations aren’t sticking
Beyond the general unpopularity of these investigations, Republicans have some other structural and political obstacles. Democrats are not letting these probes go on unanswered, a lesson from the Benghazi investigations during the Obama years. A collection of Democratic and progressive groups, like the Congressional Integrity Project, are working hard outside of government to paint these Republican investigations as illegitimate and the investigators as abusers of congressional power.
The White House itself is also proactively responding to various Republican lines of attack with frequent conversations with reporters, led by Ian Sams, the White House’s chief spokesperson on these investigations. Sams and the White House Counsel’s office have also gotten ahead of other potential vulnerabilities, like the discovery of classified documents at Biden’s home and private offices, by preemptively briefing reporters and blasting out clips and quotes of Comer, Jordan, and other Republicans talking about the political nature of these investigations.
There’s also a problem of novelty and nicheness. Many of the subjects that Republicans have pledged to investigate don’t feel fresh or new. Hunter Biden’s laptop and his business dealings were a 2020 matter; the Afghanistan withdrawal and coronavirus pandemic feel like years-old issues; and the questioning of social media companies and alleged government bias against conservatives are issues that may only truly resonate with the most partisan, internet-pilled Republican voters.
The oversight committee, especially, may simply be picking too many targets to pursue — it’s also investigating the conditions of January 6 defendants in the DC jail, the capital city’s legislative work, the impact of “progressivism” on the military, pandemic relief fraud, and coronavirus school closures, among many other things.
“The American public is already tired of these,” Brad Woodhouse, a senior adviser to the Congressional Integrity Project, a group of Democratic operatives, told me. “I understand there’s some support within the Republican base, but the American public writ large are already tired of these extreme tactics.”
There are also real questions about productivity: The committees simply haven’t held that many meetings, and none have featured people who have enough of a high profile to garner attention beyond niche conservative spaces. “I haven’t seen a single guy sweating under the bright lights,” Fox News host Jesse Watters complained in early March. “Are we gonna drill down on anything? Are we going to see anybody squirm and cough up the truth or at least plead the Fifth or something, so that we can start showering these goons with subpoenas? Where are the bombshells? Have the investigations even started?”
Donald Trump himself is also sucking up the energy and attention of the political press and the American public. As his presidential campaign blunders on, and a number of federal, state, and local investigations into his dealings with campaign money, classified documents, liability for January 6, and potential obstruction of justice continue, he has reinforced himself as one of Democrats’ best tools for diverting attention from the House investigations.
Finally, Republicans will also face a longer-term problem of political inertia. Given how unfavorably the public has been viewing these probes so far, they have limited time to change opinions, Bennett said. “The longer that you have these kind of [negative] ratings, the more entrenched that view is going to become, and the harder it’s going to be to recover.”
Saturday, March 25, 2023
Summing Up
Not that House Republicans give fuck - they'll ride their little unicorn pony until it's heart explodes - but if they want a budget that gets the government to live within its means while leaving Trump's TaxScam2017™ in place, and not touching Defense or Social Security & Medicare, then we'll just have to do without:
- Border Patrol
- Dept of Homeland Security
- Veterans' Healthcare
- Air Traffic Control
- FBI
- Coast Guard
- Ag Programs
- Food Programs
- Education
- Disaster Relief
- Housing Programs
- Space Exploration
- Cancer Research
- Courts
- Diplomats
And that's just the budget shit that Speaker McCarthy is having to ignore &/or make up a whole new language to fumble with.
Trump makes suckers of House Republicans. Again.
Be honest: Who among us has not had an extramarital affair with a porn star?
It is the rare person who can truthfully say he or she has not. And that is why I admonish you: Let he who has not lied about using campaign funds to pay hush money cast the first stone!
In the race by MAGA World to circle the wagons around Donald Trump in the Stormy Daniels case, a special prize must go to those who not only attack those investigating the former president but also defend his behavior with the adult-film actress as totally and completely normal.
“Settlements like this, whatever you think of them, are common both among famous people, celebrities and in corporate America,” one of our winners, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, misinformed his viewers. “Paying people not to talk about things, hush money, is ordinary in modern America.”
A couple of weeks ago, old text messages came out in which Carlson called Trump “a demonic force, a destroyer” and said “I hate him passionately.” Now he’s back to defending some of Trump’s seediest behavior as utterly routine.
It would never be just Carlson, of course. Elected Republican officials also collectively decided this week that it was in their interest to bring Trump back from the political dead. Once again, Trump used a fabrication to revive his flagging standing. And once again, congressional Republicans fell for it.
Just a week ago, leading Republicans were daring to hope that Trump’s sway was ebbing, as Ron DeSantis and Mike Pence took him on directly. Then Trump changed all that with just one post on his social media site Saturday morning. He announced his expectation that he “WILL BE ARRESTED ON TUESDAY.” He wrote: “PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!”
In reality, he wasn’t arrested Tuesday. Or Wednesday. Or the rest of the week. Maybe he’ll yet be indicted in New York, Georgia or Washington. Maybe he won’t. Regardless, he already notched a significant victory. House Republicans didn’t wait to see whether Trump was speaking the truth about his imminent arrest. They did as he commanded, leaping to his defense — and, in the process, returning him to his previous place of dominance atop the Republican Party. It’s all about Donald Trump — again.
Within just a few hours of Trump’s claim that he was about to be arrested, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) announced that House Republicans were launching investigations into the “outrageous abuse of power” by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and his attempt “to subvert our democracy by interfering in elections with politically motivated prosecutions.”
On Monday, three House committee chairmen fired off a letter to Bragg summoning him to testify before Congress and demanding that he produce six years’ worth of documents — all because he was “reportedly about to engage” in “the indictment of a former president.” Never mind that Bragg hadn’t (yet) done so.
Things only deteriorated from there.
By the dozen, House lawmakers and their Fox News allies denounced Bragg by calling him “a hired hit man by George Soros” (Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo.) or by saying Bragg, who is Black, is “listening to his master, George Soros” (Fox host Rachel Campos-Duffy).
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) called on DeSantis to “stop any sort of extradition of President Trump from the state of Florida.”
Mark Green (R-Tenn.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, apparently mistook Bragg’s criminal investigation of state law for a federal case. “Daniel Ortega arrested his opposition in Nicaragua and we called that a horrible thing,” he said. “Mr. Biden, Mr. President, think about that.”
House GOP conference chief Elise Stefanik (N.Y.) likewise called the investigation by a county D.A. “the epitome of the weaponizing of the federal government.”
Inevitably, Republicans found themselves not only denouncing the prosecutor but also defending Trump’s behavior. McCarthy vouched for Trump by saying that the hush money paid to Daniels “was personal money” and that Trump “wasn’t trying to hide” it — claims that are challenged by the available facts. (Fox News host Jesse Watters did McCarthy one better in Trump’s defense, telling viewers: “There’s no proof Trump slept with Stormy. There’s no baby.”)
Even Senate Republicans voiced public concern that their House counterparts had gone too far in their prosecutorial meddling. “I would hope they would stick to the agenda they ran on,” said Sen. John Cornyn (Tex.). He might offer the same advice to Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.), who called for Bragg to “be put in jail” for unspecified offenses.
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.) put it best when she told Punchbowl News: “The House is gonna do what the House is gonna do.”
And what it did this week was to put Trump back in unquestioned command of the Republican Party.
The California Republican promised right-wing holdouts that he would deliver a budget that balances within 10 years. But he also promised not to touch Social Security and Medicare. Republicans are likewise committed not to allow cuts to defense spending and veterans’ pensions, nor to allow the Trump tax cuts to lapse.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office ran the numbers on those promises at Democrats’ request, and the results are in. To keep all those pledges, Republicans would literally have to eliminate everything — everything — else the government does. No more Homeland Security, no more Border Patrol or FBI, no more Coast Guard, air traffic control or federal funds for education or highways, no agricultural programs, no housing, food or disaster assistance, no cancer research or veterans’ health care, no diplomacy or space exploration, no courts — and no Congress.
Defund the police? This is defund America. Even then, Republicans would still be in the red after 10 years.
Unsurprisingly, McCarthy’s lieutenants are attempting some rapid backtracking. House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington (R-Tex.) said this week that the 10-year balanced budget is now merely an “aspirational” target — much like my diet. He’s instead touting a separate House GOP proposal to set 2024 spending at 2022 levels, which would require smaller (though still severe) cuts but wouldn’t come close to balancing the budget.
Apparently, the 20 holdouts who almost denied McCarthy the speakership didn’t get the memo, for several of them assembled before the cameras Wednesday and declared they weren’t budging. “We’re going to present a budget that actually balances in the 10-year time frame,” proclaimed Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.). He has said McCarthy’s promise of a 10-year balanced budget was “the whole thing” that led him to drop his opposition to McCarthy’s speakership in January.
Sens. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) hosted Norman and several other anti-McCarthy holdouts, all members of the House Freedom Caucus, in the Senate television studio. There, they proclaimed their determination not to increase the debt ceiling without large spending cuts — even if that means the United States goes into a catastrophic default.
Lee revived the dangerously dubious idea that failing to raise the debt ceiling “is not a default.” “You can blow past the debt-ceiling increase deadline,” Lee said. “Yes, that causes problems … but that is not itself a default.”
The federal debt is causing “more suffrage for the American people,” said Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), who presumably meant “suffering.”
And Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) contributed this patriarchal take on Biden’s budget: “Every wife in America would shudder if that was her husband.”
The hard-liners, confused though they were, made clear that they weren’t wavering on the debt ceiling. “This is not the Republican Party of the past that will surrender,” said Rep. Bob Good (Va.). “We made history in January,” he said of the anti-McCarthy holdouts. “You’re going to see us make history again.”
Only this time, it would be the historic collapse of the American economy.
Can anybody here play this game?
Be honest: Who among us has not had an extramarital affair with a porn star?
It is the rare person who can truthfully say he or she has not. And that is why I admonish you: Let he who has not lied about using campaign funds to pay hush money cast the first stone!
In the race by MAGA World to circle the wagons around Donald Trump in the Stormy Daniels case, a special prize must go to those who not only attack those investigating the former president but also defend his behavior with the adult-film actress as totally and completely normal.
“Settlements like this, whatever you think of them, are common both among famous people, celebrities and in corporate America,” one of our winners, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, misinformed his viewers. “Paying people not to talk about things, hush money, is ordinary in modern America.”
A couple of weeks ago, old text messages came out in which Carlson called Trump “a demonic force, a destroyer” and said “I hate him passionately.” Now he’s back to defending some of Trump’s seediest behavior as utterly routine.
It would never be just Carlson, of course. Elected Republican officials also collectively decided this week that it was in their interest to bring Trump back from the political dead. Once again, Trump used a fabrication to revive his flagging standing. And once again, congressional Republicans fell for it.
Just a week ago, leading Republicans were daring to hope that Trump’s sway was ebbing, as Ron DeSantis and Mike Pence took him on directly. Then Trump changed all that with just one post on his social media site Saturday morning. He announced his expectation that he “WILL BE ARRESTED ON TUESDAY.” He wrote: “PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!”
In reality, he wasn’t arrested Tuesday. Or Wednesday. Or the rest of the week. Maybe he’ll yet be indicted in New York, Georgia or Washington. Maybe he won’t. Regardless, he already notched a significant victory. House Republicans didn’t wait to see whether Trump was speaking the truth about his imminent arrest. They did as he commanded, leaping to his defense — and, in the process, returning him to his previous place of dominance atop the Republican Party. It’s all about Donald Trump — again.
Within just a few hours of Trump’s claim that he was about to be arrested, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) announced that House Republicans were launching investigations into the “outrageous abuse of power” by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and his attempt “to subvert our democracy by interfering in elections with politically motivated prosecutions.”
On Monday, three House committee chairmen fired off a letter to Bragg summoning him to testify before Congress and demanding that he produce six years’ worth of documents — all because he was “reportedly about to engage” in “the indictment of a former president.” Never mind that Bragg hadn’t (yet) done so.
Things only deteriorated from there.
By the dozen, House lawmakers and their Fox News allies denounced Bragg by calling him “a hired hit man by George Soros” (Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo.) or by saying Bragg, who is Black, is “listening to his master, George Soros” (Fox host Rachel Campos-Duffy).
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) called on DeSantis to “stop any sort of extradition of President Trump from the state of Florida.”
Mark Green (R-Tenn.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, apparently mistook Bragg’s criminal investigation of state law for a federal case. “Daniel Ortega arrested his opposition in Nicaragua and we called that a horrible thing,” he said. “Mr. Biden, Mr. President, think about that.”
House GOP conference chief Elise Stefanik (N.Y.) likewise called the investigation by a county D.A. “the epitome of the weaponizing of the federal government.”
Inevitably, Republicans found themselves not only denouncing the prosecutor but also defending Trump’s behavior. McCarthy vouched for Trump by saying that the hush money paid to Daniels “was personal money” and that Trump “wasn’t trying to hide” it — claims that are challenged by the available facts. (Fox News host Jesse Watters did McCarthy one better in Trump’s defense, telling viewers: “There’s no proof Trump slept with Stormy. There’s no baby.”)
Even Senate Republicans voiced public concern that their House counterparts had gone too far in their prosecutorial meddling. “I would hope they would stick to the agenda they ran on,” said Sen. John Cornyn (Tex.). He might offer the same advice to Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.), who called for Bragg to “be put in jail” for unspecified offenses.
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.) put it best when she told Punchbowl News: “The House is gonna do what the House is gonna do.”
And what it did this week was to put Trump back in unquestioned command of the Republican Party.
The California Republican promised right-wing holdouts that he would deliver a budget that balances within 10 years. But he also promised not to touch Social Security and Medicare. Republicans are likewise committed not to allow cuts to defense spending and veterans’ pensions, nor to allow the Trump tax cuts to lapse.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office ran the numbers on those promises at Democrats’ request, and the results are in. To keep all those pledges, Republicans would literally have to eliminate everything — everything — else the government does. No more Homeland Security, no more Border Patrol or FBI, no more Coast Guard, air traffic control or federal funds for education or highways, no agricultural programs, no housing, food or disaster assistance, no cancer research or veterans’ health care, no diplomacy or space exploration, no courts — and no Congress.
Defund the police? This is defund America. Even then, Republicans would still be in the red after 10 years.
Unsurprisingly, McCarthy’s lieutenants are attempting some rapid backtracking. House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington (R-Tex.) said this week that the 10-year balanced budget is now merely an “aspirational” target — much like my diet. He’s instead touting a separate House GOP proposal to set 2024 spending at 2022 levels, which would require smaller (though still severe) cuts but wouldn’t come close to balancing the budget.
Apparently, the 20 holdouts who almost denied McCarthy the speakership didn’t get the memo, for several of them assembled before the cameras Wednesday and declared they weren’t budging. “We’re going to present a budget that actually balances in the 10-year time frame,” proclaimed Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.). He has said McCarthy’s promise of a 10-year balanced budget was “the whole thing” that led him to drop his opposition to McCarthy’s speakership in January.
Sens. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) hosted Norman and several other anti-McCarthy holdouts, all members of the House Freedom Caucus, in the Senate television studio. There, they proclaimed their determination not to increase the debt ceiling without large spending cuts — even if that means the United States goes into a catastrophic default.
Lee revived the dangerously dubious idea that failing to raise the debt ceiling “is not a default.” “You can blow past the debt-ceiling increase deadline,” Lee said. “Yes, that causes problems … but that is not itself a default.”
The federal debt is causing “more suffrage for the American people,” said Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), who presumably meant “suffering.”
And Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) contributed this patriarchal take on Biden’s budget: “Every wife in America would shudder if that was her husband.”
The hard-liners, confused though they were, made clear that they weren’t wavering on the debt ceiling. “This is not the Republican Party of the past that will surrender,” said Rep. Bob Good (Va.). “We made history in January,” he said of the anti-McCarthy holdouts. “You’re going to see us make history again.”
Only this time, it would be the historic collapse of the American economy.
Can anybody here play this game?
There is, theoretically, a deal to be had on the federal debt. It would have to be, as in years past, a “grand bargain” that would cut both domestic and military spending, raise taxes on the wealthy, and reform entitlement programs. But ruling out changes to all but the 15 percent of the federal budget known as nondefense discretionary spending, as House Republicans have promised, is a fool’s errand, destined to fail.
Problem is, this is a caucus full of fools — or at least a caucus of the clueless. They don’t know what they don’t know.
The median tenure for a House Republican right now is just four years. Most don’t know a time before Donald Trump took a wrecking ball to the American political system. McCarthy himself acknowledged this week that “we have to retool and rethink” because of the inexperience: “About half the conference has never served in the majority."
Problem is, this is a caucus full of fools — or at least a caucus of the clueless. They don’t know what they don’t know.
The median tenure for a House Republican right now is just four years. Most don’t know a time before Donald Trump took a wrecking ball to the American political system. McCarthy himself acknowledged this week that “we have to retool and rethink” because of the inexperience: “About half the conference has never served in the majority."
House Financial Services Committee Chairman Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) had a similar observation this week, as members of the House Freedom Caucus blasted what they called a “bailout” of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank — even though the government’s guarantee of deposits prevented a broader banking panic. “It’s complicated and takes a little time for people to understand," he said of his wet-behind-the-ears colleagues.
Their on-the-job training is off to a slow start. Three months into this new House majority, only two minor bills have become law: one rejecting the District of Columbia’s criminal code, and another declassifying what the federal government knows about the pandemic’s origins. As Rep. Blake Moore of Utah, a (rare) moderate Republican, told the Wall Street Journal: “We haven’t passed one of the must-pass bills this year.”
Yet the speaker claims that “we have changed Congress on its head in less than three months.”
In a way, he has changed Congress on its head — by executing a face plant.
Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?
This week was the House GOP retreat at a J.W. Marriott in Orlando, an annual gathering in which Republicans talk the same nonsense about a “woke” and “weaponized” government that they do in Washington, only they do it wearing khakis, L.L. Bean fleece vests and Ritz-Carlton logo sweaters.
These gatherings are not called “retreats” anymore (that sounds a bit too Ritz-Carlton) but rather “issues conferences.” This is appropriate, because they’ve got a lot of issues.
Trump has just taken over the party again. The same 20 zealots who denied McCarthy the speakership until he gave them the keys to the car are now about to drive the vehicle off a cliff and into default. Republicans don’t agree on Ukraine, bank bailouts, border legislation or much of anything else.
As if real life weren’t hard enough, GOP leaders decided to spice things up at their retreat issues conference by playing a war game. Politico’s Olivia Beavers reported that they pretended China had invaded Taiwan, McCarthy was president and “committee chairs got a fictional promotion to cabinet secretaries.”
President McCarthy and Secretary of War Jim Jordan? God help us all.
Informed by his war gaming, McCarthy waxed eloquent with reporters about his foreign policy views when asked a question about Ukraine. “I have a real concern of the aggression of Russia. I have a more greater concern of this axis of power coming together of China, Russia, North Korea and Iran,” he announced. “I watched this happen in the world another time before I was ever born.”
Without explaining how that was possible, he continued: “I think it is utmost important that Russia lose. I think it’s utmost important that China does not think to go capture Taiwan now that President Xi changed his constitution and is now serving another five terms and believes to go in there. … I think it’s a very responsibility that yes Russia loses in this aggression.”
Well, okay then.
Two days later, McCarthy, asked a question about China, offered some high-level thoughts … on the Second World War.
“What should they have done when they first saw Hitler, Mussolini and Japan getting together?” he asked. “What dependencies did they become weak upon? What aggressions did they look the other way? On building up a military of Hitler even though it went against the Treaty of Versailles. Or the movement in of Czechoslovakia and Austria. Or the movement into Crimea. Or the desire to take Taiwan. So walking through the pandemic thinking about where was America waking up to medical supplies?”
I think I know the name of the war game House Republicans were playing: Mad Libs.
These gatherings are not called “retreats” anymore (that sounds a bit too Ritz-Carlton) but rather “issues conferences.” This is appropriate, because they’ve got a lot of issues.
Trump has just taken over the party again. The same 20 zealots who denied McCarthy the speakership until he gave them the keys to the car are now about to drive the vehicle off a cliff and into default. Republicans don’t agree on Ukraine, bank bailouts, border legislation or much of anything else.
As if real life weren’t hard enough, GOP leaders decided to spice things up at their retreat issues conference by playing a war game. Politico’s Olivia Beavers reported that they pretended China had invaded Taiwan, McCarthy was president and “committee chairs got a fictional promotion to cabinet secretaries.”
President McCarthy and Secretary of War Jim Jordan? God help us all.
Informed by his war gaming, McCarthy waxed eloquent with reporters about his foreign policy views when asked a question about Ukraine. “I have a real concern of the aggression of Russia. I have a more greater concern of this axis of power coming together of China, Russia, North Korea and Iran,” he announced. “I watched this happen in the world another time before I was ever born.”
Without explaining how that was possible, he continued: “I think it is utmost important that Russia lose. I think it’s utmost important that China does not think to go capture Taiwan now that President Xi changed his constitution and is now serving another five terms and believes to go in there. … I think it’s a very responsibility that yes Russia loses in this aggression.”
Well, okay then.
Two days later, McCarthy, asked a question about China, offered some high-level thoughts … on the Second World War.
“What should they have done when they first saw Hitler, Mussolini and Japan getting together?” he asked. “What dependencies did they become weak upon? What aggressions did they look the other way? On building up a military of Hitler even though it went against the Treaty of Versailles. Or the movement in of Czechoslovakia and Austria. Or the movement into Crimea. Or the desire to take Taiwan. So walking through the pandemic thinking about where was America waking up to medical supplies?”
I think I know the name of the war game House Republicans were playing: Mad Libs.
Saturday, March 11, 2023
Today's Daddy State Bozo
A sitting US Senator is suggesting we make deadly incursions inside another country's sovereign borders, issuing death threats against the citizens of a foreign nation - a nation which is an important ally and trading partner.
Note: he makes a very Daddy State move, ie: "Let's change US law in order to make the crime of murdering Mexican citizens acceptable". And he does it after the operative phrase, "... start killing people in Mexico ..." which serves two purposes.
- It gives him cover - he can rant and rave for the benefit of the MAGA gang, and still be relatively assured that nothing he tells them he wants to do will ever be done
- It plants the seed - if the rabble raise a big enough stink, he can claim leadership on the issue.
Hint: he has the magic (R) next to his name.
Geopolitics is a worldwide poker game
with more than 200 players.
They're all cheating,
and they all know they're all cheating.
The calculus is never simple.
Friday, March 10, 2023
Today's Grand Idea
Governor DeSantis is putting in place a mechanism to track menstrual cycles.
Help him out, ladies.
Please send all your used "sanitary products" to:
Gov Ron DeSantis
700 N Adams St
Tallahassee FL 32303
Friday, March 03, 2023
Today's Trigger Attempt
Dear Florida,
Florida bill would require bloggers who write about governor to register with the state
TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — Florida Sen. Jason Brodeur (R-Lake Mary) wants bloggers who write about Gov. Ron DeSantis, Attorney General Ashley Moody, and other members of the Florida executive cabinet or legislature to register with the state or face fines.
Brodeur’s proposal, Senate Bill 1316: Information Dissemination, would require any blogger writing about government officials to register with the Florida Office of Legislative Services or the Commission on Ethics.
In the bill, Brodeur wrote that those who write “an article, a story, or a series of stories,” about “the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor, a Cabinet officer, or any member of the Legislature,” and receives or will receive payment for doing so, must register with state offices within five days after the publication of an article that mentions an elected state official.
If another blog post is added to a blog, the blogger would then be required to submit monthly reports on the 10th of each month with the appropriate state office. They would not have to submit a report on months when no content is published.
For blog posts that “concern an elected member of the legislature” or “an officer of the executive branch,” monthly reports must disclose the amount of compensation received for the coverage, rounded to the nearest $10 value.
If compensation is paid for a series of posts or for a specific amount of time, the blogger would be required to disclose the total amount to be received, upon publication of the first post in said series or timeframe.
Additional compensation must be disclosed later on.
Failure to file these disclosures or register with state officials, if the bill passes, would lead to daily fines for the bloggers, with a maximum amount per report, not per writer, of $2,500. The per-day fine is $25 per report for each day it’s late.
The bill also requires that bloggers file notices of failure to file a timely report the same way that lobbyists file their disclosures and reports on assessed fines. Fines must be paid within 30 days of payment notice, unless an appeal is filed with the appropriate office. Fine payments must be deposited into the Legislative Lobbyist Registration Trust Fund if it concerns an elected member of the legislature.
For writing about members of the executive branch, fines would be made payable to the Executive Branch Lobby Registration Trust Fund or, if it concerns both groups, the fine may be paid to both related trust funds in equal amounts.
Explicitly, the blogger rule would not apply to newspapers or similar publications, under Brodeur’s proposed legislation.
In addition to the blogger regulations, the bill also removes provisions of state statutes to require judicial notices of sales to be published on publicly accessible websites, and specifies that a government agency can publish legally required advertisements and public notices on county sites if the cost is not paid by or recovered from an individual.
Should the bill pass, it would take effect immediately upon approval.
Fuck you.
Your pal,
Mike
My note is not about this exceedingly stoopid "legislation". It's about what I think is the exceedingly stoopid attempt by an exceedingly dick-headed politician to get "the libs" to freak out.
The problem with that is this:
I can stone fucking guarantee there are people all over this country who think he's right to do it, and I'll bet dollars to dingleberries something like it pops up again in seemingly random places.
TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — Florida Sen. Jason Brodeur (R-Lake Mary) wants bloggers who write about Gov. Ron DeSantis, Attorney General Ashley Moody, and other members of the Florida executive cabinet or legislature to register with the state or face fines.
Brodeur’s proposal, Senate Bill 1316: Information Dissemination, would require any blogger writing about government officials to register with the Florida Office of Legislative Services or the Commission on Ethics.
In the bill, Brodeur wrote that those who write “an article, a story, or a series of stories,” about “the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor, a Cabinet officer, or any member of the Legislature,” and receives or will receive payment for doing so, must register with state offices within five days after the publication of an article that mentions an elected state official.
If another blog post is added to a blog, the blogger would then be required to submit monthly reports on the 10th of each month with the appropriate state office. They would not have to submit a report on months when no content is published.
For blog posts that “concern an elected member of the legislature” or “an officer of the executive branch,” monthly reports must disclose the amount of compensation received for the coverage, rounded to the nearest $10 value.
If compensation is paid for a series of posts or for a specific amount of time, the blogger would be required to disclose the total amount to be received, upon publication of the first post in said series or timeframe.
Additional compensation must be disclosed later on.
Failure to file these disclosures or register with state officials, if the bill passes, would lead to daily fines for the bloggers, with a maximum amount per report, not per writer, of $2,500. The per-day fine is $25 per report for each day it’s late.
The bill also requires that bloggers file notices of failure to file a timely report the same way that lobbyists file their disclosures and reports on assessed fines. Fines must be paid within 30 days of payment notice, unless an appeal is filed with the appropriate office. Fine payments must be deposited into the Legislative Lobbyist Registration Trust Fund if it concerns an elected member of the legislature.
For writing about members of the executive branch, fines would be made payable to the Executive Branch Lobby Registration Trust Fund or, if it concerns both groups, the fine may be paid to both related trust funds in equal amounts.
Explicitly, the blogger rule would not apply to newspapers or similar publications, under Brodeur’s proposed legislation.
In addition to the blogger regulations, the bill also removes provisions of state statutes to require judicial notices of sales to be published on publicly accessible websites, and specifies that a government agency can publish legally required advertisements and public notices on county sites if the cost is not paid by or recovered from an individual.
Should the bill pass, it would take effect immediately upon approval.
ICYMI
Meet Tennessee State Representative Paul Sherrell (R - Pokacuzzin County).
Mr Sherrell has proposed bringing back lynching as a form of punishment for certain crimes in The Volunteer State.
Sunday, February 26, 2023
Hyper Hypocrite
As we await the momentous occasion of Tennessee passing legislation that outlaws drag shows, let us take a moment to revel in the memory of when Governor Bill Lee dressed in drag for some high school thing or something.
Experiencing a little gender confusion here, Governor?
Friday, February 24, 2023
Today's (deleted) Tweet
¾ of the world's population came across our southern border ?
Seems a little high.
(her media team had to be thrilled at all the engagement this was getting, but then they deleted it once they realized it was so bad not even her fans were buying it, and there was no way for them to spin it into pretending it was just snarky and sarcastic)
(her media team had to be thrilled at all the engagement this was getting, but then they deleted it once they realized it was so bad not even her fans were buying it, and there was no way for them to spin it into pretending it was just snarky and sarcastic)
Thursday, February 23, 2023
The Big Flub
DeSantis’s flop on foreign affairs comes as no surprise
The idea of Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis running for president has sounded swell to many Republicans desperate to find an alternative to defeated former president Donald Trump. The reality, as they are discovering, might be sobering and deflating.
Sign up for a weekly roundup of thought-provoking ideas and debates
In the space of just a few days, DeSantis demonstrated his limitations when his state record comes under scrutiny and when he is compelled to opine on foreign policy.
This week, he began a national tour in New York City, presumably to tout his record on crime. In the minds of MAGA Republicans, crime is about not just public safety but also elites’ irresponsibility and the culture wars. DeSantis blamed New York’s bail laws “on Democrats trying to ‘out-woke’ each other,” as the New York Daily News reported. It’s far from clear what he means in this context by “out-woke” — a slur usually deployed to intimate that Democrats are catering to minorities and ignoring Whites’ legitimate concerns.
Regardless, any comparison between Florida and New York does not serve DeSantis well. In 2020, the homicide rate in Florida was 5.9 murders per 100,000 people, and the violent crime rate was 384 per 100,000, according to the Daily Beast, citing the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. New York, meanwhile, had 4.2 homicides per 100,000 people and a violent crime rate of 364 per 100,000 people. New York City itself had a homicide rate of 5.6 per 100,000, slightly below the national average of 6.5 and half Miami’s rate of 12.8.
Meanwhile, DeSantis has wasted police resources on his election-crimes unit, whose cases have led to three dismissals and serious questions about whether other cases will ever come to trial.
Predictably, Eric Adams, New York’s law-and-order mayor, blasted DeSantis. “Welcome to NYC, @GovRonDeSantis, a place where we don’t ban books, discriminate against our LGBTQ+ neighbors, use asylum seekers as props, or let the government stand between a woman and health care,” he tweeted.
DeSantis’s crime foray, however, was not his worst moment on tour. At the moment President Biden was getting plaudits for venturing into a war-torn country to stand with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, DeSantis pandered to pro-Russian apologists.
“The fear of Russia going into NATO countries and all that and steamrolling, you know, that has not even come close to happening,” he said in an interview, neglecting to mention that it hasn’t happened because of the heroic efforts of Ukrainians and the alliance Biden stitched together. DeSantis went on, saying of Russia: “I think they’ve shown themselves to be a third-rate military power.” The third-rate power nevertheless has committed countless atrocities and devastated the economy and landscape of Ukraine.
DeSantis then reverted to an America First talking point about Biden: “He’s very concerned about those borders halfway around the world. He’s not done anything to secure our own border here at home.” In over his head, he muddled along: “And I don’t think it’s in our interest to be getting into proxy war with China, getting involved over things like the borderlands or over Crimea.”
Next he declared, “I think it would behoove them to identify what is the strategic objective that they’re trying to achieve, but just saying it’s an open-ended blank check, that is not acceptable.” The objective is a free and independent Ukraine without Russian troops, obviously.
Perhaps Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — who told the Munich Security Conference that “Republican leaders are committed to a strong transatlantic alliance” and that “America’s own core national interests are at stake” — could help the governor understand.
DeSantis might be utterly uninformed on foreign policy, or he might be pandering to the MAGA base. Regardless, his tone-deaf, reflexive know-nothingism should set off alarms for Republicans. If they want to restore the party’s image as tough on national security and find someone to make Biden look feeble, they might want to look elsewhere.
The idea of Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis running for president has sounded swell to many Republicans desperate to find an alternative to defeated former president Donald Trump. The reality, as they are discovering, might be sobering and deflating.
Sign up for a weekly roundup of thought-provoking ideas and debates
In the space of just a few days, DeSantis demonstrated his limitations when his state record comes under scrutiny and when he is compelled to opine on foreign policy.
This week, he began a national tour in New York City, presumably to tout his record on crime. In the minds of MAGA Republicans, crime is about not just public safety but also elites’ irresponsibility and the culture wars. DeSantis blamed New York’s bail laws “on Democrats trying to ‘out-woke’ each other,” as the New York Daily News reported. It’s far from clear what he means in this context by “out-woke” — a slur usually deployed to intimate that Democrats are catering to minorities and ignoring Whites’ legitimate concerns.
Regardless, any comparison between Florida and New York does not serve DeSantis well. In 2020, the homicide rate in Florida was 5.9 murders per 100,000 people, and the violent crime rate was 384 per 100,000, according to the Daily Beast, citing the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. New York, meanwhile, had 4.2 homicides per 100,000 people and a violent crime rate of 364 per 100,000 people. New York City itself had a homicide rate of 5.6 per 100,000, slightly below the national average of 6.5 and half Miami’s rate of 12.8.
Meanwhile, DeSantis has wasted police resources on his election-crimes unit, whose cases have led to three dismissals and serious questions about whether other cases will ever come to trial.
Predictably, Eric Adams, New York’s law-and-order mayor, blasted DeSantis. “Welcome to NYC, @GovRonDeSantis, a place where we don’t ban books, discriminate against our LGBTQ+ neighbors, use asylum seekers as props, or let the government stand between a woman and health care,” he tweeted.
DeSantis’s crime foray, however, was not his worst moment on tour. At the moment President Biden was getting plaudits for venturing into a war-torn country to stand with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, DeSantis pandered to pro-Russian apologists.
“The fear of Russia going into NATO countries and all that and steamrolling, you know, that has not even come close to happening,” he said in an interview, neglecting to mention that it hasn’t happened because of the heroic efforts of Ukrainians and the alliance Biden stitched together. DeSantis went on, saying of Russia: “I think they’ve shown themselves to be a third-rate military power.” The third-rate power nevertheless has committed countless atrocities and devastated the economy and landscape of Ukraine.
DeSantis then reverted to an America First talking point about Biden: “He’s very concerned about those borders halfway around the world. He’s not done anything to secure our own border here at home.” In over his head, he muddled along: “And I don’t think it’s in our interest to be getting into proxy war with China, getting involved over things like the borderlands or over Crimea.”
Next he declared, “I think it would behoove them to identify what is the strategic objective that they’re trying to achieve, but just saying it’s an open-ended blank check, that is not acceptable.” The objective is a free and independent Ukraine without Russian troops, obviously.
Perhaps Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — who told the Munich Security Conference that “Republican leaders are committed to a strong transatlantic alliance” and that “America’s own core national interests are at stake” — could help the governor understand.
DeSantis might be utterly uninformed on foreign policy, or he might be pandering to the MAGA base. Regardless, his tone-deaf, reflexive know-nothingism should set off alarms for Republicans. If they want to restore the party’s image as tough on national security and find someone to make Biden look feeble, they might want to look elsewhere.
Monday, February 13, 2023
Tuesday, November 29, 2022
Shooting Themselves In The Foot
If Arizona can't get its shit together on this, then they may not be able to send half of their congressional delegation to Washington in January, and the state will be without full representation in the federal government.
Are we tired of all the winning yet?
Arizona County Refusing To Certify Election Results Could Threaten GOP House Majority
A county in Arizona is refusing to certify the results of its elections following Democratic statewide candidates winning in the state, which could flip a House seat won by a Republican to a Democratic win, according to the Associated Press.
The Board of Supervisors of Cochise County, Arizona, bordering Mexico and the U.S. state of New Mexico in Arizona’s Southeast, voted to not certify the official tally of votes in the general elections of Nov. 8, which saw Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona reelected to a full term and Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs elected the next Governor of Arizona.
A meeting of the board was held on Monday via Zoom, with the only agenda item being a motion to verify the results. In a voice vote, it received zero votes in favor and two votes against, with the Democratic chair not voting, resulting in an acclaimed failure among the three-member board.
While Republican senatorial candidate Blake Masters has conceded to Kelly, Lake has not conceded to Hobbs and is currently suing the Board of Supervisors of Maricopa County for records, seeking to contest the election.
The two Republican members of the county’s board, who outnumber the Democratic chair, have sought to hear from experts, including Hobbs, regarding the “accreditation of voting machines,” with the members arguing that the machines used to accept ballots were not properly certified to do so under state law, as stated by members of the public in a meeting of the board on Nov. 18, per the AP.
The county’s non-certification comes on the day of Monday’s deadline for all counties to certify their results. Their announcement was met with criticism from Democrats, who announced they would sue the county to compel its verification.
“The only presentation Cochise is going to get is in a courtroom,” tweeted Marc Elias, the founder of Democracy Docket and a known Democratic election attorney, indicating that he would sue Cochise County. Meanwhile, Hobbs, in her capacity as Secretary of State, has previously said she would sue the county to affirm her win.
The Board has “failed to uphold their responsibility for Cochise voters,” wrote Sophia Solis, a spokeswoman for Hobbs, in an email to the AP.
Should the county not certify its votes, Arizona State Elections Director Kori Lorick has said that its votes may be excluded. If that happens, the results of two elections in the state – for the U.S. Representative for Arizona’s 6th Congressional District and the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, who oversees the state schooling system – will change, enabling Democrats to win the U.S. House race and Superintendent’s race, while leaving statewide races for governor and senator unchanged.
Republican candidate Juan Ciscomani, a former advisor to outgoing Republican Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona, defeated Democratic former State Sen. Kristen Engel in the area’s congressional race by a margin of 1.4% or 5,232 votes. If Cochise County’s 39,650 votes are excluded, a majority of them being in Ciscomani’s favor, it would give Engel a slim plurality.
Meanwhile, in the Superintendent’s race, Republican candidate Tom Horne defeated Democratic incumbent Kathy Hoffman by a margin of less than 1% of the vote. Excluding Cochise’s votes would enable Hoffman to win a second term after previously facing a recall attempt.
Lake’s challenge to the results has been supported by former President Donald Trump.
On Monday, former President Trump said Kari Lake should be installed as Governor of the state, “Massive numbers of “BROKEN” voting machines in Republican Districts on Election Day. Mechanics sent in to “FIX” them made them worse. Kari had to be taken to a Democrat area, which was working perfectly, to vote. Her opponent ran the Election. This is yet another criminal voting operation – SO OBVIOUS. Kari Lake should be installed Governor of Arizona. This is almost as bad as the 2020 Presidential Election, which the Unselect Committee refuses to touch because they know it was Fraudulent!”
The state’s election cannot be certified in Arizona until all counties have certified the results.
Governor’s candidate Kari Lake and Arizona Secretary of State candidate Mark Finchem have not conceded in their races, while Attorney General candidate Abraham “Abe” Hamadeh trails in his race by approximately 570 votes.
A recount is triggered in races that fall within a margin of 0.5% under state law.
Lake told The Daily Mail on Saturday that she still believes she will become governor of Arizona.
“The way they run elections in Maricopa County is worse than in banana republics around this world,” Lake said in an exclusive interview, referring to Maricopa County.
“And I’ll tell you what, I believe at the end of the day that this will be turned around and I don’t know what the solution will be but I still believe I will become governor, and we are going to restore honesty to our elections,” she added.
Monday, October 24, 2022
It Gets Worse
I'll say it again:
(pay wall)
Opinion
DNA kits for kids show Texas’s twisted priorities
Members of the U.S. armed forces are fingerprinted, their DNA is collected, and the information is kept on file and in storage. It is a precaution for those terrible situations in which a body needs to be identified and an acknowledgement of the danger inherent in serving in the military. That Texas officials think schoolchildren should take the same precautions as troops who go into battle speaks volumes about the twisted priorities that have protected gun rights at the expense of children.
“A gift of safety, from our family to yours” reads the message printed on fingerprint and DNA kits that are being handed out to parents of Texas public school students to help them identify their children “in case of an emergency.” Parents who opt in — the program is free and voluntary — will be able to keep their child’s DNA and fingerprint information at home, and can later provide it to law enforcement agencies in emergency situations if needed. The 2021 law establishing a “child identification program” doesn’t explicitly say it’s for identifying victims of school shootings, and text on the kits only references missing children. But five months after a gunman killed 19 fourth-graders and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., it is hard not to make the connection.
“I worry every single day when I send my kid to school. Now we’re giving parents DNA kits so that when their child is killed with the same weapon of war I had when I was in Afghanistan, parents can use them to identify them?” said the mother of a Texas second-grader. “Yeah! Awesome! Let’s identify kids after they’ve been murdered instead of fixing issues that could ultimately prevent them from being murdered,” Brett Cross, whose 10-year-old son, Uziyah Garcia, was killed in the Uvalde shooting, posted on Twitter. Among the gut-wrenching things we learned about Uvalde was that authorities had to ask for DNA samples from parents because it was hard to identify the bodies due to the devastating damage caused by the high-powered rifle the gunman used. A pediatrician who treated Uvalde victims told Congress what he witnessed: “Two children whose bodies had been so pulverized by the bullets fired at them, decapitated, whose flesh had been so ripped apart that the only clue as to their identities was the blood-spattered cartoon clothes still clinging to them.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), who is running for reelection this year, has refused to even entertain the idea of trying to do something about the availability of weapons of war that did such unspeakable damage. Such as banning them or, at the very least, changing the law so that someone such as the Uvalde shooter wouldn’t be able to legally buy an assault rifle just after they turned 18. Instead, the state hands out kits that make it easier for parents to identify their slaughtered children and has the gall to do it in the name of safety.
Somewhere in Texas, someone has recently discovered he has a passion for DNA testing and all he really wants to do is help those poor unfortunate people in their time of need - and for only about 60 bucks a pop.
$322,295,160.00
in somebody's pocket
if they send out a test for every school kid.
A nice fat payday,
potentially for years to come.
(pay wall)
Opinion
DNA kits for kids show Texas’s twisted priorities
Members of the U.S. armed forces are fingerprinted, their DNA is collected, and the information is kept on file and in storage. It is a precaution for those terrible situations in which a body needs to be identified and an acknowledgement of the danger inherent in serving in the military. That Texas officials think schoolchildren should take the same precautions as troops who go into battle speaks volumes about the twisted priorities that have protected gun rights at the expense of children.
“A gift of safety, from our family to yours” reads the message printed on fingerprint and DNA kits that are being handed out to parents of Texas public school students to help them identify their children “in case of an emergency.” Parents who opt in — the program is free and voluntary — will be able to keep their child’s DNA and fingerprint information at home, and can later provide it to law enforcement agencies in emergency situations if needed. The 2021 law establishing a “child identification program” doesn’t explicitly say it’s for identifying victims of school shootings, and text on the kits only references missing children. But five months after a gunman killed 19 fourth-graders and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., it is hard not to make the connection.
“I worry every single day when I send my kid to school. Now we’re giving parents DNA kits so that when their child is killed with the same weapon of war I had when I was in Afghanistan, parents can use them to identify them?” said the mother of a Texas second-grader. “Yeah! Awesome! Let’s identify kids after they’ve been murdered instead of fixing issues that could ultimately prevent them from being murdered,” Brett Cross, whose 10-year-old son, Uziyah Garcia, was killed in the Uvalde shooting, posted on Twitter. Among the gut-wrenching things we learned about Uvalde was that authorities had to ask for DNA samples from parents because it was hard to identify the bodies due to the devastating damage caused by the high-powered rifle the gunman used. A pediatrician who treated Uvalde victims told Congress what he witnessed: “Two children whose bodies had been so pulverized by the bullets fired at them, decapitated, whose flesh had been so ripped apart that the only clue as to their identities was the blood-spattered cartoon clothes still clinging to them.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), who is running for reelection this year, has refused to even entertain the idea of trying to do something about the availability of weapons of war that did such unspeakable damage. Such as banning them or, at the very least, changing the law so that someone such as the Uvalde shooter wouldn’t be able to legally buy an assault rifle just after they turned 18. Instead, the state hands out kits that make it easier for parents to identify their slaughtered children and has the gall to do it in the name of safety.
Tell me there's no real probability that this little stunt is aimed at making parents less likely to support public schools, and more likely for another brother-in-law to pop up and sell his ideas for privatizing education "for the sake of your children's safety".
- or just -
Sorry, folks, but we can't afford to keep the schools open because we spent all the money on School Resource Officers, steel doors, combat arms training for teachers - and DNA tests so we can identify what's left of your kids once all of our other stupid ideas fail.
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