Reading replies to her tweets is fucking creepy. What’s with all the anime avatars and weird obvious bots? Since when are weebs all MAGA? 0% chance this is a real human
How many of those openings have temporary acting heads? It should be a bigger scandal than it is that so many cabinet poaitions are headed up by non-confirmed individuals who are, in essence, political appointees rather than qualified execs.
I’m far from encouraging it, but if this is how the next civil war starts (urban combat against the raids), I would be far from surprised if this is the trigger.
Trump: Paul Ryan Was Bribed to Call Me Stupid nymag.com/intell... Psychiatrists use Mueller Report to track Donald Trump’s mental state, warn: ‘There is very little time now’ oregonlive.com/politi...
I hope they get fucked but probably won’t. They’ll victimize themselves to their members who they DGAF about other than as a fundraising source and probably get an uptick in donations. Sigh.
You're telling me, that the president should have congresses approval to send military strikes? I have never heard of such a preposterous notion.
I’m kinda glad Beto is ignoring another senate run. The primary race just to get to Cornyn is already filling up with a list of incredible candidates.
Trump's social media summit was a complete embarrassment ... that did just what Trump wanted Spoiler On Thursday, Donald Trump unexpectedly folded on the question of adding a citizenship question to the census. After warning that he could absolutely put the issue in place with an executive order, Trump hauled out his attorney general and secretary of commerce, set up a podium in the Rose Garden, and did what he always does when not throwing insults—he whined. But Trump had the perfect audience for his “We tried to slip this in at the last minute, then ran out of time, so it’s all everyone else’s fault” complaint. Because on Thursday afternoon, Trump filled the Rose Garden with a collection of villainy and scum that would embarrass any Mos Eisley cantina. The event was labeled as a “press conference,” but it was a very Trumpian press conference: one at which Trump took no questions, and one where the actual press was made to stand at a distance on the other side of ropes. That’s because all the chairs at this press conference were reserved for the internet’s most hateful: the alt-right pundits that were scraped up to attend Trump’s “social media summit.” That group didn’t try to ask Trump any questions. That’s not their role. Instead, they used this moment of access and historic location to join Trump in attacking the free press. There was badge-wearing Nazi, and former Trump adviser, Sebastian Gorka threatening reporters. And there was professional 9/11 truther Mark Dice yelling at CNN. There was pundit, songwriter, and congressional candidate Joy Villa—a candidate in California, or New York, or possibly Florida, she hasn’t made up her mind yet—smirking at the media and informing them that their day, the day where people asked questions, expected answers, and checked those responses for truthfulness, is over. These are the voices that Trump is trying to elevate. Voices that scream racism. Voices that scream hate. And, in the case of Dice, voices that scream that both Hollywood and the music industry are run by a combination of Illuminati and Satanists who hide spells in Super Bowl halftime rituals designed to blind the public to the existence of a worldwide gay conspiracy. And the Starbucks logo features a mermaid prostitute. And Katy Perry is a witch. But the real purpose of Trump’s “social media summit” wasn’t to promote conspiracy theorists. It was to promote two of his own conspiracy theories. The primary focus of Trump’s summit on social media was … how awful all the social media platforms are. Despite not just a lack of real evidence, but mountains of genuine counterevidence , Trump continues to push the conspiracy theory that “conservative voices” are being banned from Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms for nothing more than supporting Trump. As The Washington Post reported, Trump spent much of his time focused on telling the alt-right that they were the real victims of one of those conspiracies they love to write about. “We have terrible bias. We have censorship like nobody has any understanding,” said Trump. This is the reason Trump believes his tweets get much less support than those of Barack Obama, who, three years out of office, continues to have far more followers than Trump. And, in fact, Trump did go on at length about ways in which he believes Twitter has suppressed his followers. But the actual fact is more likely that Trump doesn’t believe it anymore than Mark Dice believes that “monkey bars are racist.” It’s just a handy claim. It’s handy to Trump in reinforcing his even bigger conspiracy theory. His “They’re all out to get me” theory. That’s the theory in which every honest investigator looking into his actions is part of the “deep state”; any honest reporter showing that Trump’s words aren’t true is spreading “fake news”; any judge following the law is part of the “swamp”; and every torch-carrying white supremacist is “good people.” Anyone, even someone who organized a boycott of a Star Wars movie because it was “feminist propaganda” (and yes, that’s Mark Dice again), is good people, so long as they support Trump. This is the America that Donald Trump champions, and for a very good reason. Because when there is no authority for truth, the loudest voice wins. It really doesn’t matter if those voices are screaming hate. It doesn’t matter if they’re networks of screaming bots run by the Russian military. All that matters is that they’re screaming loud enough to drown out the press … which has to stand way back there, behind the ropes. Trump declares his victory over the news media with a unbroken spew of lies Spoiler Thursday was an all-too-typical day at the Twitter mines for Donald Trump. In addition to giving juicy hints that he was going to end that constitutional crisis thing by simply ending the Constitution, Trump laced his morning rants with all the none-too-subtle racism, misogyny, and simple ignorance that his base demands. And then he spent a lot of time on the topic of the day: what a wonderful job he’s done destroying the free press. The focus of Trump’s activities at the White House on Thursday, including the setting for his backhanded smack at the Supreme Court, is a meeting on the rising power of social media contrasted with the fall of traditional news sources. In a series of tweets, Trump praised that growing power, while continuing to deride traditional media outlets as “fake news.” According to Trump, social media isn’t just ready to challenge other outlets; it’s ready to completely supplant those sources. In recent days, not even Fox News has escaped Trump’s slaps at the traditional media. He’s complained that Fox continues to keep up its “balanced” pretense by occasionally having Democrats on the air rather than singing a 24/7 Trump-is-god chorus. And he’s stated his bitter opposition to the idea that Fox has some commentators who dare not to fall in line. Trump made those attacks from his home base on Twitter—the one place where he knows that he never has to produce a fact, or worry about being challenged by a journalist, or spend a moment sweating over the idea that overt racism and threats of violence might have a downside. Twitter has made it clear that opposing racism has a price, but when you’re Trump, they let you grab your audience by any means you choose. Trump does not mention that most of the current topics on social media have their origins in traditional media. Because, after all, without paid investigative journalists providing stories, social media would be nothing but an absolute sea of unsubstantiated opinion, irrefutable claims, and … yeah, that is the point. But that doesn’t mean Trump is going to leave social media alone. He’s going to require more hate, more lies, and more unchecked threats. Or else. In the midst of his promotion of social media as so much better than traditional media, Trump demonstrates his thesis by passing along huge lies about the state of the economy, laughing over the idea that he may just stick around in office for “10 or 14” more years, and delivering good old-fashioned schoolyard bully shots aimed at Elizabeth Warren. This is exactly what Trump feels the media should be: a megaphone for the powerful. Loudest, meanest, ugliest voice wins. If that’s not completely clear, he drops a cherry on top by describing himself as “so great looking and smart, a true Stable Genius!” But, Trump warns, social media companies are no longer going to be allowed the “tremendous dishonesty, bias, discrimination and suppression practiced by certain companies.” By which Trump means the mythology on the right that “conservative voices” are being stilled for little things such as death threats, inciting racial hatred, and calling for mass violence. That silencing, says Trump, is going to end. And as for traditional media … its days are numbered. It will survive only “for a limited period.” It’s no wonder that Trump is willing to overlook Mohammed bin Salman’s torture and dismemberment of a Washington Post columnist, and wave away Vladimir Putin signing off on the murder of 200 journalists. Those are not issues for Trump. They’re something that excites him. Both men are only accelerating a process that Trump completely supports.]/spoiler] DK's take on yesterday
GOP congressman explains why Republicans elect so few women. Naturally, he blames a Democratic woman Rodney Davis Spoiler Republican Rep. Rodney Davis has a novel explanation for why there aren’t more Republican women in Congress: It’s House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s fault. Mark Maxwell of TV station WCIA in Champaign, Illinois, reported this gem. “There are too few members of our Republican conference that are women or African-American or are a minority,” Davis told a group of women on Monday. (He’s not wrong there.) ”I get asked a lot, ‘what do you think as a Republican with the fact that you have many fewer women in your conference today than you ever have?’” he continued. “I like to remind people that it is Nancy Pelosi who in many cases spent millions of dollars to elect a male Democrat over a female [Republican] in swing districts.” Um. Davis’ “many cases” boils down to two cases, which if won by Republican women would have brought the total number of Republican women in the House to a whopping 15, which is substantially fewer than the number of Democratic women elected for the first time in 2018, many of them in swing districts previously represented by Republican men. So aside from having a truly special thing to blame Pelosi for—beating Republicans? seriously?—Davis is basically arguing that Pelosi should have been willing to have fewer overall women in the House in order to have a couple more of them be Republicans. This is a special kind of inane. EMILY’S List responded in a statement: “To be clear: Of the 40 seats Republicans lost in 2018, 19 Republican men were replaced by EMILY’s List-endorsed Democratic women. We look forward to Congressman Davis joining them.” 'I vote for brains, not boobs': Why the House GOP just failed to add another woman to its ranks David Nir for Daily Kos Elections Daily Kos Staff Wednesday July 10, 2019 · 11:34 AM CDT Recommend 149 Tweet 230 Comments 230 New North Carolina Republican Joan Perry (at left), who will not be joining the House Republican caucus On Tuesday night, state Rep. Greg Murphy crushed pediatrician Joan Perry by a 60-40 margin in the Republican primary runoff for North Carolina's 3rd Congressional District, making him the heavy favorite in September's special election for this deeply conservative vacant seat. Spoiler But the real story is not who won but rather who lost. Ever since last year's thumpin' that saw the ranks of House GOP women plummet from an already-low 23 to a miniscule 13, Republicans have been desperate to increase their numbers. Perry offered an early opportunity to do just that, prompting groups devoted to electing Republican women to spend more than $1 million on her behalf. The GOP's problems, however, run far too deep to be fixed by a mere million bucks. It's not just that there were influential factions that opposed Perry—the nihilistic House Freedom Caucus, for instance, backed Murphy—but the very idea of electing women because it's important to elect women is anathema to wide swaths of the Republican Party. Activist Amy Kremer, who co-founded a group called Women for Trump, encapsulated that view perfectly in this remarkable quote: "If these women are saying that they should support women because they have the same body parts just for the sake of having more women in Congress, then they're sexist," she said in an interview. "I'm smarter than that. I vote for brains, not boobs." At a week-long campaign school for women at Yale University last month that attracted just a dozen Republicans (out of 80 total attendees), one GOP participant, Elana Doyle, lamented, "We are so welcomed in the background to help volunteer, to help spread information, but when it comes time for a woman to really step up into the spotlight, I almost feel like it's crickets." She's so close to understanding what the Republican Party really thinks of women like her: "Brains, not boobs." Republicans who refuse to grapple with their party's deep-rooted hostility toward women have instead come up with all manner of creative excuses to explain away the tiny numbers of GOP women in Congress. Just this week, Illinois Rep. Rodney Davis trotted out the gonzo argument that the real person to blame is … Nancy Pelosi. This is actually a retread of a ridiculous assertion made by Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise, the number two House Republican, back in January: that Pelosi spent millions specifically to defeat Republican women candidates. Leaving aside the obvious stupidity—how dare Nancy Pelosi try to elect Democrats to Congress!—it's nonsense on the “merits,” too, such as they are. Scalise specifically claimed that Pelosi "will spend a lot more money—in many cases twice as much more—to defeat Republican female candidates." The numbers show that's not remotely true: In the 53 races where the DCCC played a role in 2018, 11 featured GOP women, and the committee spent an average of $1.2 million in these contests. In the other 42 elections (all versus Republican men), the DCCC spent an average of $1.4 million. Try again. Davis, meanwhile, averred that Pelosi "in many cases spent millions of dollars to elect a male Democrat over a female Republican in swing districts." Again, total b.s. The DCCC spent seven figures to help a Democratic man unseat a Republican woman in exactly one race last year: New York's 22nd District, where Democrat Anthony Brindisi ousted GOP Rep. Claudia Tenney. If Davis in fact felt strongly about the dearth of women in his caucus, he certainly had a chance to do something about it prior to Tuesday night. But the sum he donated to Perry's cause is equal to the number of new Republican women who will be joining the House GOP this year: zero.
Texas has a nice bench of Dem politicians hope Wendy Davis runs against Chip Roy (she may already be)
Florida deputy busted for planting drugs on drivers Spoiler The latest episode of “Cops Behaving Badly—And Illegally” comes from Jackson County, Florida, north of Panama City. A now-former sheriff’s deputy there, Zachary Wester, was arrested yesterday after a yearlong investigation revealed that he had planted meth and marijuana on dozens of innocent drivers, then framed them for drug possession. Now he could face as much as 30 years in prison. Wester, who was fired last September, was arrested Wednesday and charged with 52 counts of racketeering, false imprisonment, official misconduct, fabricating evidence and possession of controlled substances, among other charges. He’s accused of indiscriminately targeting innocent drivers and hauling them off to jail after planting meth or marijuana in their vehicles while feigning a “search." “There is no question that Wester’s crimes were deliberate and that his actions put innocent people in jail,” Chris Williams, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s assistant special agent in charge, said in a news release. This whole imbroglio started with a prosecutor who remembered that his duty is not to punish the guilty, but protect the innocent. He noticed that Wester, who had been on the force since 2016, had a bad habit of keeping his body camera off. When he turned it on, the footage often didn’t match what he wrote in his reports. The prosecutor also noticed that Wester just happened to hit the record button after “discovering” drugs in vehicles during traffic stops. In one case, Wester was caught on camera holding what appeared to be a small baggie in his hand—only to have it conveniently disappear before appearing to find meth in a woman’s car. When Wester’s superiors found out about this, they were alarmed enough to ask the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to investigate last August. Wester was fired a month later. The fallout has already been staggering. Some 119 of Wester’s cases have already been thrown out, and at least eight inmates have been released from prison. Several of his victims have either sued the sheriff’s department for false arrest or have filed notices intending to sue. At least one victim briefly lost custody of his daughter after being framed. The case is presently being handled by prosecutors in the Pensacola/Fort Walton Beach area, presumably due to conflicts of interest. The state’s attorney there, Bill Eddins, has no intention of offering a plea deal—meaning that Wester could potentially be in his 50s before he gets out of jail. And this may just scratch the surface. According to the Tallahassee Democrat, Wester was a deputy in neighboring Liberty County for a year before signing on in Jackson County. One has to wonder if he’s pulled similar stunts there. I have to hope that the U. S. Attorney for the Northern District of Florida is taking a look at this as well. This is the very definition of violating people’s rights under color of law. I know 30 years sounds like a lot, and anything less than 20 years would be a joke. But this criminal with a badge ruined who knows how many lives. There is no such thing as too harsh for something like this. I also have to hope that there’s a very deep dive into how Wester became a deputy in the first place. After all, many cases of cops who abuse their badges, and who even turn criminal, involve people who have no business being on the force in the first place. Whatever the case, this must never be allowed to happen again.
If they just let our women win we would have more republican women in congress! But congressman they got a number of women elected against Republican men, how do you respond? IMMIGRATION, MILITARY, SECOND AMENDMENT
And this is OLD NEWS. It should be an issue raised daily until Mercer is convicted of tax evasion. This country allowed a $7B tax CHEAT to bankroll a presidential campaign and install an administration favorable to his cause. What absolute bullshit.
Amazing the people that tell us that we should get over slavery are having a day to celebrate the man who lost the war over slavery.
Forrest was a racist piece of shit but I always find his speech to his men after his surrender in 1865 to be surprisingly poignant (and timely). "Submit to the powers to be, and to aid in restoring peace and establishing law and order throughout the land." Today you learned that a former Confederate General and Grand Wizard of the KKK had more integrity than the current president of the United States.