Defining the 21st Century Republican Party?

[waitingtoconnect]

Listening to this Trump crowd boo him and the things they yell at him ("two face!") is hilarious. And they don't seem to buy his groveling and attempts to connect himself to Trump.

And yet, he was re-elected 3 years ago with a ~55% win. Something tells me they'd all vote for him again and still somehow boo him in public.

Presumably few in that crowd are going to turn around and vote for a Democrat instead of Graham. Some might stay home, some might write in Donald Trump or some BS, but certainly not vote for the only plausible alternative to Graham.

I found that video to be awful. I don’t understand the glee expressed by the original poster on Twitter. Better than coffee? Huh? It’s a crowd of deranged MAGAts screaming at Graham because he hasn’t shown enough fealty to Trump. I don’t find a single thing to be gleeful there.

It’s very alarming. The obvious misunderstanding of the basic principals of the constitution are very alarming.

[waitingtoconnect]

Christian family values:

https://www.meidastouch.com/news/boeber ... er-breasts

“Closer inspection of the security footage reveals the extent of Boebert’s depraved behavior during the event. In the footage, in the middle of a packed crowd, Boebert’s boyfriend can be seen groping the congresswoman’s breasts. Boebert takes his hand and pulls it closer to her breasts as she turns to speak into his ear. The Republican congresswoman then puts her hands on her date’s crotch and appears to rub his penis.”

The woman is appalling and says appalling things. The fact she nearly lost in one of the reddist districts in the country makes it obvious she’s offensive and a hypocrite. It’s not the level of professionalism I expect from a Congress person but it isn’t criminal. And s he did this with the expectation it wouldn’t be filmed and shared.

You don’t win without integrity.

[Kurth]

Depraved?? Really?

I'm not following up on this, but I sure as hell hope there is more to it than the quote to warrant labeling it depravity.

Nope. Not really. About on the maturity level you’d expect from some high school kids at a movie theater, but not much more than that.

Boebert is awful. But her getting hot and bothered with her date in a theater is pretty fucking far from “depraved.”

Why do people have to be so stupid all the time?

[gilraen]

Depraved?? Really?

I'm not following up on this, but I sure as hell hope there is more to it than the quote to warrant labeling it depravity.

Nope. Not really. About on the maturity level you’d expect from some high school kids at a movie theater, but not much more than that.

Boebert is awful. But her getting hot and bothered with her date in a theater is pretty fucking far from “depraved.”

Why do people have to be so stupid all the time?

Yeah, that was a stupid thing to focus on - considering she and her date were kicked out of the theater halfway through that performance for vaping and recording the show with her phone.

[Carpet_pissr]

Yeah, the original “story” (but is it really? Someone who seems to go out of their way to be an asshole, being an asshole, wow!) was about obnoxious behavior (vaping, being loud, etc) but the groping part came out much later.

This was already a story, somehow, before the pearl clutching details were known.

Her apology: “I simply fell short of my values”. I’d say you behaved precisely in line with them, but tomato/tomahto I guess.

Values seem to be “obnoxious, selfish spoiler” so…well played!

[malchior]

I don't know if depraved is the wrong word for out in the open sexual groping during a potential family show. It's not too much of a stretch. I think most people would be highly offended by that if their children were present. Beetlejuice itself is fairly risque so opinions probably vary widely there.

[Dramatist]

Yeah the Twitter pearl clutching is a bit ridiculous but that’s what Twitter is for. But her entitled, hypocritical asshole behavior is entirely on brand for her.


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[Victoria Raverna]

And she did this with the expectation it wouldn’t be filmed and shared.

She did that in public. This is not a case of she is doing something in private with her date and someone secretly recorded it and shared that to the public.

[Alefroth]

de·praved

adjective
morally corrupt; wicked.
"a depraved indifference to human life"

[Grifman]

Jenna changes her mind:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... enna-ellis

“Jenna Ellis – the Donald Trump lawyer who like the former president faces criminal charges regarding attempted election subversion in his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020 – says she will not vote for him in the future because he is a “malignant narcissist” who cannot admit mistakes.”

[malchior]

Yeah, I guess I wasn't agreeing with the "turning point" element as much as the GOP has clearly normalized it. Speaking of which, has DeSantis chimed in yet about the laser messages last night or should I keep waiting for that?

The comment is not really aimed at anyone in particular. I feel like everyone has used that line and then gone back to sleepwalking into whatever happens next.

You talk about people "sleepwalking into whatever happens next." I'm really interested in what proactive measures you propose to mitigate the fact that most of the information the electorate appears to take in at this point is misinformation and that one of our only two viable political parties is entirely dysfunctional and has been coopted by an anti-democratic authoritarian who may or may not also be a complete and total idiot.

If people were to wake up from their "sleepwalking," what would you have them do?

There are lots of things folks could be doing. The press could be focused on countering misinformation. The NY Times today has a story about the disinformation effort around DePape today. It's actually a good summation of what happened. IMO they and every outlet need to do this *every time*. Not when it's so obvious that it is like an anvil just fell on their head.

The major outlets and potentially others organizations should be setting up a (dis)misinformation beat. I posted it above but Matthew Gertz alone was ahead of this because he monitored the right-wing noise machine building it in real-time before it turned into NY Post articles. Small teams with a few analysts and a lead reporter or two could do real work here. There are undoubtably teams working on creating the disinformation in the first place. This is an information war. We need to treat it as such and have counter-teams.

Just bumping this up because Tom Nichols - "Americans Are Sleepwalking Through a National Emergency" used this very language in an article in The Atlantic and I thought it was neat that people are catching up.

Still it's a good piece in the sense he simply lists just a sliver of the out of control things happening including the ridiculous interview on Meet the Press this weekend. I didn't even bother to post about it because...fuck it...we're unfortunately not going to get help from the press.Their bosses think they will win no matter what (wrongly) and don't care if we're an authoritarian state. They can go to hell.

Americans have become accustomed to so much in public life that they would have once found shocking. But many of these events are not only shameful; they are a warning, a kind of static energy filling the air just before a lightning strike. America is in a state of emergency, yet few of its citizens seem to realize it.

For example, a single senator, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, has been holding up hundreds of military promotions for months, endangering the national security of the United States. The acting chief of naval operations says it will take years for the Navy to recover from the damage. (Welcome news, no doubt, in Beijing.) Few people outside of America’s senior military leadership seem particularly concerned.

Meanwhile, the House of Representatives is going to open an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. Why? Well, why not? Speaker Kevin McCarthy promised the extremists in his party that if they made him speaker, he would do what he was told. And so he has; the People’s House is now effectively being run by members such as Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, fringe figures who in better times might never have been elected, and in a sensible House would have been relegated to the backbenches so far away from the rostrum that their seats would be in a different time zone. (And let us not even speak of Lauren Boebert.)

Elsewhere, the governor of Florida and his vaccine-skeptic surgeon general are telling people under 65 not to get boosted against COVID. He apparently thinks that anti-science extremism will help him wrest the Republican presidential nomination away from Donald Trump, and so he is resorting to a deeply cynical ploy that could cost lives.

...

Instead, we have Kristen Welker inaugurating the reboot of Meet the Press by leaning forward with focused sincerity and asking Trump, “Tell me—Mr. President, tell me what you see when you look at your mug shot?”
That wasn’t even the worst of it. Like Kaitlan Collins in her disastrous town hall with Trump on CNN this past spring, Welker lost control of the interview, because she, too, insisted on treating Trump like an ordinary political candidate instead of the seditious menace he’s become.

Many of my colleagues in the media have already dissected Welker’s failure, and I won’t pile on, because I agree with my friend Jonathan Last at The Bulwark, who wrote this morning, “I’m being hard on Kristen Welker, but this isn’t really about Kristen Welker. It’s about the mainstream broadcast media. All of them. In 2016 broadcast media was totally inadequate to the job of covering an aspiring authoritarian … Today—even after witnessing an insurrection—they still don’t seem to understand the situation and their complicity in it.”

[malchior]

Totally normal stuff going on here in the United States. Paul Gosar called for Milley's execution in his news letter and a certain Presidential front-runner piled on and said that "in the past" the punishment for "crimes" Milley committed would be death. Cool Cool.

[GreenGoo]

The main problem with the US justice system is that it's not killing enough Americans.

[Pyperkub]

Jenna changes her mind:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... enna-ellis

“Jenna Ellis – the Donald Trump lawyer who like the former president faces criminal charges regarding attempted election subversion in his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020 – says she will not vote for him in the future because he is a “malignant narcissist” who cannot admit mistakes.”

If she's not in jail, she'll probably vote for him again.

[Carpet_pissr]

While we should always be skeptical of people’s claims that write books in these situations, this sure tracks with what seems to be who Matt Gaetz really is:

“In one instance, she wrote that Gaetz brushed his thumb across her chin and said, “Has anyone ever told you you’re a national treasure?”

Supposedly he also pretended to be lost while they were all at Camp David, showed up at her cabin, asked her to ride with him back to his cabin because he was lost (she said every cabin overtly marked, and in a circle, impossible to get lost)…apparently Kevin McCarthy (!) hilariously witnessed this pathetic attempt, said ‘get a life, Matt’ and slammed the door. LOL

[Pyperkub]

He should have tried with Boebert

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[coopasonic]

He should have tried with Boebert

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Hutchinson is already a bit old for Gaetz. Boebert is wayyy too old.

[waitingtoconnect]

Trouble is a lot of men don’t trust women like Hutchinson because she wasn’t loyal even if they are democrats or independents. Many men are cheering the comments from people saying women should never be hired again because “they always be pimping themselves out”.

Nobody credible disputes what she is saying but another lot of people she’s dodgy because she waited to release a book before she said anything.

She’s ironically helping Trump.

The cheeseburger mountain is going to fall on us because trump is just a grifter who has attached himself to the mission to end American democracy which was started in the 1970s. He’s being used as a distraction while the slow motion coup continues. In many ways fighting trump is the only thing us truly independent voters have. No matter what we do though we seem destined for idiocracy.

[malchior]

I'll translate: He was black.

[disarm]

Well that's a pretty disgusting thing to say...and par for the Tuberville course...

[coopasonic]

"our military is not an equal opportunity employer"? Ummmm? WTF?

[malchior]

I encourage you to listen to it in full if you haven't. That is what coded white nationalist speech sounds like. I'm 100% sure of it. I can't be sure about the following with the same certainty but it'd be no shock that he belongs to a certain "secret society" or one just like it.

[Alefroth]

I mean, it's not really even coded.

[Unagi]

I mean, it's not really even coded.

Yeah as far as code goes, - it's at the Hello World level.

[LawBeefaroni]

"our military is not an equal opportunity employer"? Ummmm? WTF?

That in a vaccuum isn't completely crazy. There are physical, age, and mental barriers to entry. And they only recently allowed gay and trans individuals to serve. But we all know what he really means. Anyone can die but only the right sort can be allowed to lead.

[LordMortis]

"our military is not an equal opportunity employer"? Ummmm? WTF?

That in a vaccuum isn't completely crazy. There are physical, age, and mental barriers to entry. And they only recently allowed gay and trans individuals to serve. But we all know what he really means. Anyone can die but only the right sort can be allowed to lead.

I couldn't even take the ASVAB once the looked at my arm. I was trying to track the Air Force for college out of high school and they put me on a "We'll draft you as a paper pusher when we have drafted everyone else first" list.

[Holman]

HARRY TRUMAN INTENSIFIES.

[Scraper]

Ladies and gentlemen Ohio's Secretary of State and a candidate for Senate.

https://www.dispatch.com/story/opinion/ ... 921051007/

Hopefully it's not pay walled. He's talking about an anti public school bill he is pushing and his opening sentence says " But today that hope is hanging on by a thread, compromised by a leftist educational elite blindly devoted to creating equal outcomes." The rest of the piece is a train wreck of name calling and baseless fear mongering.

[malchior]

Yup this is what drives "school choice" in so many jurisdictions. Beyond the fear mongering is perpetuating fundamental mistakes (on purpose most likely) by saying it is about equal outcomes. That'd be nice but fundamentally it is about equal opportunity which he of course isn't for. You can tell because he is producing white nationalist talking points.

[Scraper]

Frank LaRose is the same guy who just snuck in a special election ballot issue in August trying to amend the state constitution so that it takes a 60% vote to change the state constitution and makes it impossible for people to get a constitutional issue on the ballot. (Currently it's a 50% + 1 requirement to amend). He did this literally 6 months after the Republican Legislature outlawed special elections outside of the normal November and May windows. But they said no it doesn't count for this issue.

Luckily his attempt fired up both the Democrats and the non-authoritarian Repulicans and went down 57% to 43%. All of this was to try and prevent the vote this November over legalizing abortion access in the state. Which one can assume will pass probably somewhere close to 57% to 43%.

[Victoria Raverna]

Almost none of the Republicans raised their hands when asked this:

“Will members of the Oversight Committee please raise your hand if you believe both Hunter and Trump should be held accountable for any of the indictments against them if convicted by a jury of their peers?”

Seriously?

[Carpet_pissr]

Sadly, that is not surprising. They’ve been behaving as if they believed that (some are above the law, but not those who they oppose) to be true, so this tracks.

[LawBeefaroni]

The GOP doesn't play by the rules.

While the Dems throw flags against themselves. It's an honorable way to play but it doesn't lead to winning. And with what's at stake, winning is pretty important.

[Blackhawk]

There still have to be lines, or there's no point in winning. Something something Ozymandias.

[Zarathud]

If this is the standard for impeachment, then Trump can’t be President. He would be subject to impeachment on inauguration.

[Unagi]

There still have to be lines, or there's no point in winning. Something something Ozymandias.

+1

[LawBeefaroni]

There still have to be lines, or there's no point in winning. Something something Ozymandias.

Yeah, it's a conundrum. But you lose and the country is lost.

[Blackhawk]

There still have to be lines, or there's no point in winning. Something something Ozymandias.

Yeah, it's a conundrum. But you lose and the country is lost.

And if you cross those lines and win, the country is lost.

The trick, I think, is figuring out which lines we can cross that help, but don't turn us into what we're fighting against. More aggressive campaigning? Yes. Forcing certain issues with loopholes? Sure (especially if we finish by closing those loopholes.) Our own 'alternative facts?' No. Tapping into peoples fears? Yes. Tapping into peoples' hatred? No.

[Alefroth]

If this is the standard for impeachment, then Trump can’t be President. He would be subject to impeachment on inauguration.

Exactly. They want to impeach Biden for dishonesty? Lol

[Pyperkub]

This is a horrifying, yet logical, next step for the GOP..

North Carolina’s new $300 billion state budget contains a provision that gives extraordinary investigative powers to a partisan oversight committee co-chaired by Senate Leader Phil Berger (R) and House Speaker Tim Moore (R).

The Joint Legislative Committee on Government Operations — or Gov Ops for short — is empowered to seize “any document or system of record” from anyone who works in or with state and local government during its investigations. The rule applies to contractors, subcontractors, and any other non-state entity “receiving, directly and indirectly, public funds,” including charities and state universities.

The Republican leaders who pushed to dramatically expand Gov Ops' power say it will enhance government accountability. The same leaders, however, pushed through several provisions in the budget that restrict access to legislative public records, eliminating a critical tool for accountability — including for Gov Ops itself.

One provision repeals a law that required “communications regarding redistricting” be made publicly available when new legislative maps were adopted.

Under the new budget, "lawmakers responding to public records requests will have no obligation to share any drafts or materials that guided their redistricting decisions."

Another provision allows North Carolina lawmakers to exempt themselves from public records requests. Current and former legislators, the law says, ”shall not be required to reveal or to consent to reveal any document, supporting document, drafting request, or information request made or received by that legislator while a legislator.” Under the state’s previous law, legislators were recognized as the custodians of their own records, but had to file a “specific exemption” to withhold records.

A third provision will allow legislators to “determine…whether a record is a public record.” Legislators can now decide to “retain, destroy, sell, loan, or otherwise dispose of'' their documents.

All the easier to both commit and cover up crimes.