[News] Post a Political News Story

Ongoing discussion of the political news of the day. This thread is for 'smaller' stories that don't call for their own thread. If a story blows up, please start a new thread for it.

fangblackbone wrote:

I can't believe I haven't seen more coverage of Michael Flynn's brother being one of the people in the pentagon in charge of denying/delaying sending the national guard troops to the capitol during the attempted coup.

Has it been debunked?

There's been coverage of it. The issue really wasn't that Lt. Gen. Charles Flynn was involved a key call between the Capitol Police and D.C. officials. He's the deputy chief of staff for operations, plans and training and should have been involved in such a call and he wasn't a decision maker. Additionally, there's no evidence that he's a crazy traitorous sh*tbag like his brother.

The issue is that the DoD repeatedly and falsely denied that Flynn was involved with the call over the course of several days.

It's too soon to tell if our military lied because DoD officials were very hesitant to have troops roll up and start beating down domestic terrorists--many of whom currently or formerly served--because of the optics, because members of the senior staff were in on the attempted coup, or just because senior staff were paralyzed by indecision. None of those are good answers.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

Twitter thread: Lawsuit seeks to throw out the results of every election in 2020, keep Trump in power, but bar every member of Congress, every governor, every secretary of state from ever holding public office ever again.

Yes, it was filed by Trump supporters, how did you guess?

...

When you get to the end, you discover it's been filed by two people who took part in the Jan 6 capitol building siege.

Update: The "lawyers" have filed another motion for a restraining order.

REQUEST FOR TEMPORARY RESTRAINING ORDER TO PRESERVE THE STATUS QUO ANTE BY PLACING CONGRESS AND THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH IN A STATE OF STEWARDSHIP.

They want the court to appoint a steward to run the federal government until this lawsuit is resolved.

But it gets better.

“Gondor has no King,” to invoke a very appropriate quote from the J.R.R. Tolkien epic classic, “Lord of the Rings.”2 The Judicial Branch is currently the only remaining legitimate branch of government and therefore has a duty uphold the checks and balances in the Constitution to curb the unlawful power grab perpetrated on the electorate by Defendants. The Court must immediately act to check the power of the Legislative and Executive branches by placing them into a state of stewardship to preserve the status quo ante, pending a preliminary injunction and then until a trial on the merits. Plaintiffs hereby request that the Honorable Court enter the Temporary Restraining Order attached hereto enjoining the illegitimate 117th Congress and 46th President (collectively, the “Usurpers”) from enacting any new legislation or making any substantial departures from United States policy, foreign and domestic,as it existed prior to their unlawful usurpation of power on January 3, 2021 and January 20, 2021, respectively by appointing a group of trusted special masters to provide oversight to the Usurpers. This concept is similar to the concept of placing a corrupted business in receivership or in bankruptcy law, which places a “trustee” in charge of the “debtor-in-possession” during the bankruptcy case to rehabilitate the corrupted organization.

2During the course of the epic trilogy, the rightful King of Gondor had abandoned the throne. Since only the rightful king could sit on the throne of Gondor, a steward was appointed to manage Gondor until the return of the King, known as “Aragorn,” occurred at the end of the story. This analogy is applicable since there is now in Washington, D.C., a group of individuals calling themselves the President, Vice President, and Congress who have no rightful claim to govern the American People. Accordingly, asset forth in the Proposed Temporary Restraining Order, as a remedy the Court should appoint a group of special masters (the “Stewards”) to provide a check the power of the illegitimate President until this Constitutional Crisis can be resolved through a peaceful legal process of a Preliminary Injunction Hearing and a jury trial on the merits.

Yes, they're quoting Lord of the Rings in a motion to dissolve the government. Somehow they missed the irony of citing Denethor considering the fact that he was a terrible steward and quite crazy.

Hehe. They're right that it's an appropriate quote, though they should follow the book a little more closely. Good ol' Denethor trying to deny giving over leadership power to the lawful recipient.

I'm amazed at how much these folks #selfawarewolves

Filing lawsuits is not free. Why waste money on this?

Stealthpizza wrote:

Filing lawsuits is not free. Why waste money on this?

Worrying about finite numbers of moneys is for poor people.

Is there anything trump didn't destroy for conservatives?

CNN moves to No. 1, Fox drops in post-election ratings shakeup:

Conservatives did that, not Trump. Fox dared to call the election for Biden, and they rejected it en masse.

Stealthpizza wrote:

Filing lawsuits is not free. Why waste money on this?

This is all a bizarre, round-about way to try and keep the two lawyers out of jail. They both participated in the capitol building attack.

They're not smart people.

Malor wrote:

Conservatives did that, not Trump. Fox dared to call the election for Biden, and they rejected it en masse.

...because of their allegiance to Trump and wholehearted acceptance of his bullsh*t.

Yeah Trump turned on Fox, started attacking them after they called Arizona. He caused that.

In Buckeye cancel culture news:

Legislator who questioned Black hygiene to lead Senate health panel

Associated Press wrote:

COLUMBUS, Ohio — A Republican lawmaker and doctor who questioned whether members of “the colored population” were disproportionately contracting the coronavirus because of their hygiene is drawing new criticism from Black lawmakers after his appointment to lead the state Senate Health Committee.

“Could it just be that African Americans – or the colored population — do not wash their hands as well as other groups? Or wear masks? Or do not socially distance themselves?” state Sen. Stephen Huffman asked a Black health expert in June 11 testimony. “Could that just be the explanation of why there’s a higher incidence?”

The comments resulted in calls from Democrats and the ACLU of Ohio for him to resign from the GOP-controlled Senate.

Huffman, of Tipp City, was appointed last week by Senate President Matt Huffman, his cousin, to chair the committee even after he was fired from his job as a Dayton-area emergency room physician for his comments.

In a letter Wednesday, the Ohio Black Legislative Caucus demanded a health committee leader who understands and can respond to the inequities of health care in Ohio “without political influence.”

...

“Senator Huffman is a medical doctor and highly qualified to chair the Health Committee,” spokesperson John Fortney said Friday in a written statement. “He has a long record of providing healthcare to minority neighborhoods and has joined multiple mission trips at his own expense to treat those from disadvantaged countries.”

Fortney added that Huffman apologized at the time “for asking a clumsy and awkwardly worded question.”

“Sincere apologies deserve sincere forgiveness, and not the perpetual politically weaponized judgment of the cancel culture,” he said.

“Sincere apologies deserve sincere forgiveness, and not the perpetual politically weaponized judgment of the cancel culture,” he said.

Man, f*ck that guy.

One county, worlds apart: Bridging the political divide

he fired up her laptop to scour the internet for bits from right-wing websites and conspiratorial YouTube channels.

The inauguration of Joe Biden was just days away, and Natalie Abbas was feverishly searching for 11th-hour interventions that could prevent the swearing-in of a president she’ll likely never accept. She sent a video to her friend and political sparring partner, Jim Carpenter.

Five miles across town, the local newspaper was on Carpenter’s sofa and The Washington Post on his doorstep. When he clicked on Abbas’ link, his jaw dropped and his white eyebrows darted up and down.

“This is nonsense,” he said, shaking his head. Then he laughed so hard he bent at the belly and slapped his knee. “It’s really nonsense.”

Abbas and Carpenter are local ambassadors for a program designed to bridge the nation’s extraordinary political divide, and the gulf between them is about as wide as one gets.

Carpenter is a 73-year-old retired statistician who believes what dozens of courts have found: Biden is the rightful winner. Abbas, 59, says her conviction that the election was stolen from former President Donald Trump is as strong as her belief in God. Together, they ponder the greatest challenge facing Biden and American society: how can they find common ground if they no longer exist in the same reality?

They don’t agree on basic facts. They don’t even share a vocabulary. They use the same words — truth, proof, patriotism — but they don’t mean the same thing.

In this sick and scared country, many have retreated to their bubbles, surrounding themselves with people certain the other side is their enemy — inhuman, un-American. Polls show roughly two-thirds of Republicans express doubts about the election.

So Carpenter and Abbas decided to navigate one of the tensest weeks in American memory together, as the Trump administration ended and Biden’s began. Abbas, who flirts with the QAnon conspiracy theory that a cabal of child-killing pedophiles runs the world, still desperately wanted to believe it wouldn’t happen. Carpenter could barely wait for the new president, one he believes is a man of character capable of leading the country off this dark and dangerous path.

“People are getting threatened on both sides,” he said. “People are going berserk.”

“It’s crazy,” Abbas replied.

“So tell them to stop. Can you tell them to stop?”

“Can you tell your people to stop?”

They both sighed.

“I think we can lead by example?” Abbas offered.

Carpenter nodded. He’d written himself a personal mission statement that to him seems as true as any mathematical equation: “create a world of connection and respect by seeing the light in the eyes of others.”

“Where is the light?” Carpenter said. “I’ve got to find it somewhere.”

This is nice, but you see the extent of the gap we're talking about later:

It was four o’clock, the end of Abbas’s workday as a paralegal investigator for a government contractor. In the evenings she turns her attention to being a “digital soldier” in an army searching for tidbits to prove that Trump is the rightful victor.

“It’s a fight for good and evil,” she believes.

Her path to politics was personal. When her daughter became addicted to opioids, she began advocating for policy change and took a leadership position in a local Republican club.

She saw systems fail those most vulnerable, and her faith in the standard truth-bearers of American democracy — courts, Congress, the media — eroded. She felt she could trust nothing but believe anything.

Now she thinks even mainstream conservative sources like Fox News aren’t telling the whole truth, especially since the network reported Biden’s victory. So she looks elsewhere.

If she were alone in her thinking, she might have felt she was “in no man’s land all by myself.” But there is so much conspiratorial material, she says, and so many others on this road with her.

“Sometimes you feel like, gee, am I crazy?” she said. “We know we’re not insane, but our world has become very chaotic and we’re just trying to sort it out.”

In the days leading up to Biden’s inauguration, Abbas fielded frenzied texts and calls from a close-knit group, each searching for proof that Trump would remain in the White House. As the hours ticked by, one friend grew increasingly panicked. Another called with a wild rumor about a last-minute military intervention that needed investigating.

“You need to get on it,” he told Abbas.

“I’m on it,” she said, clicking open a private search engine, because she doesn’t trust traditional ones not to filter results or track her keystrokes.

Abbas’s metric for discerning truth relies in part on intuition and faith.

“When I speak truth or I see something, I get goosebumps,” she said. “It’s a guide from God that I feel maybe I’m on the right track.”

Abbas grabbed the remote to switch on a video in which an unseen narrator described a vast global conspiracy of intertwined elitist villains.

“If Jim were here, he’d have his head in his hands,” she said with a laugh.

____

Carpenter’s phone beeped with a message from Abbas. She thought she was delivering proof: A fake map ricocheting around social media showing Trump winning nearly every state.

“Why we claim a win,” she wrote.

“California red?” Carpenter shot back. “Doesn’t pass the sniff test.”

Ah, the political divide where one side is firmly grounded in reality and the other side needs to be institutionalized and deprogrammed before they kill someone else.

I just had to say this:

Her path to politics was personal. When her daughter became addicted to opioids, she began advocating for policy change and took a leadership position in a local Republican club.

She saw systems fail those most vulnerable, and her faith in the standard truth-bearers of American democracy — courts, Congress, the media — eroded. She felt she could trust nothing but believe anything.

Because the Republicans screwed up our healthcare systems. Her daughter would have been a lot more likely to get help without the constant Republican attempts to destroy government.

If there was no War on Drugs and we just treated addiction like the medical issue it is, her daughter would have a much better chance of recovery, or at least of being able to maintain herself. Given support, an opioid addiction often won't destroy your life all by itself. The biggest reason it's so destructive is that the government criminalizes it.

And she wants more hate and lack of empathy in the government. She is demanding the exact opposite of her actual interests.

Malor wrote:

I just had to say this:

Her path to politics was personal. When her daughter became addicted to opioids, she began advocating for policy change and took a leadership position in a local Republican club.

She saw systems fail those most vulnerable, and her faith in the standard truth-bearers of American democracy — courts, Congress, the media — eroded. She felt she could trust nothing but believe anything.

Because the Republicans screwed up our healthcare systems. Her daughter would have been a lot more likely to get help without the constant Republican attempts to destroy government.

If there was no War on Drugs and we just treated addiction like the medical issue it is, her daughter would have a much better chance of recovery, or at least of being able to maintain herself. Given support, an opioid addiction often won't destroy your life all by itself. The biggest reason it's so destructive is that the government criminalizes it.

How do I unlock more likes to give this post? GWJ gold.

Hawley's got a new op-ed in the New York Post titled "It's time to stand up against the muzzling of America," and, to quote Paleo:

Removed by a moderator.

Hi! This is not actually removed by a moderator. However, now edited by a moderator to reflect that you haven't actually had any moderation action on your profile and that you wrote this yourself of your own volition? Though you may enjoy how cute you think you're being, I'd appreciate not doing stuff like this in the future. thanks - Amoebic.

Well, the NY Post is the Parler of newspapers, so that tracks. No, let me revise; the Post is Parler with a chumbox.

I read the piece about the political divide, and it didn't help me with my fundamental question: how the heck do we run a democracy where a sizable fraction of the population believe two things: 'fdshfjkehkcevs' and "anyone who doesn't also say 'fdshfjkehkcevs' is lying to you". I keep a line in my quotes file about this, from Amanda Marcotte: "Arguing facts is pointless with people who are lying to themselves at you."

Prederick wrote:

Hawley's got a new op-ed in the New York Post titled "It's time to stand up against the muzzling of America," and, to quote Paleo:

Removed by a moderator.

I hate it when I'm muzzled and only the 4th largest newspaper in the country will print my op-ed.

Gross. Just gross...

(CNN)Sarah Huckabee Sanders, President Donald Trump's former press secretary, announced Monday that she is running for governor of Arkansas.

"With the radical left now in charge of Washington, your governor is your last line of defense. In fact, your governor must be on the front line," Sanders said in a nearly eight-minute video posted on Twitter. "So today, I announce my candidacy for governor of Arkansas."

She also notes the riot at the Capitol earlier this month as an example of lawlessness in the country.
"We've seen violence in our streets, at a congressional baseball practice and at our Capitol. This is not who we are as Americans. To remain free, we must have law and order," she says in the clip.

Another update on the "Gondor has no King" lawsuit that is trying to banish the entire 117th Congress and install Trump as president:

https://twitter.com/questauthority/s...

As far as I can tell from the docket, this is the FOURTH attempt in a week to get a TRO; the question the judge will ask if they ever figure out how to get the judge's attention will be "couldn't you have served by now;" and this whole thing is a mess.
Also, if they didn't want their case to be known as "in re Gondor" they really shouldn't have gone with the (non-literary) "Gondor has no king" quote.

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Esl3ifbW4AYBQ0R?format=png&name=large)

Fifth, implying that your Twitter beef with a reporter is evidence of a "greater coordinated effort to perpetrate an illegal election" isn't going to make it less likely that the judge will notice that you're wearing clownshoes as earrings and have underpants on your head.

If the Arkansas GOP had any sense they'd force her to run independent and assure she gets no GOP dollars or support.

Oh, lovely! Their current governor is Asa Hutchinson...

I guess we can hope they split the vote and land a competent Dem in the mansion.

fangblackbone wrote:

If the Arkansas GOP had any sense they'd force her to run independent and assure she gets no GOP dollars or support.

Oh, lovely! Their current governor is Asa Hutchinson...

I guess we can hope they split the vote and land a competent Dem in the mansion.

Asa is, thankfully, term limited

I expect her to be a very popular candidate there. I'd be surprised if the Republican vote was meaningfully split after the primary.

Ohio Senate seat up for grabs 2022.

(CNN)Republican Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio announced Monday that he will not run for reelection after his current term in office ends in 2022, saying in a statement that the entrenched partisan gridlock in Washington was a factor in his decision.

As if Sanders wasn't bad enough...

There is already speculation that Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, a close ally and vocal defender of Trump, could run.

Other possible GOP candidates include: J.D. Vance, the author of Hillbilly "Elegy," Josh Mandel, who dropped out of the 2018 GOP primary race to challenge Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, and Jon Husted, the state's lieutenant governor.

They're not getting any saner.

The Oregon Republican party has falsely claimed in a resolution that there is “growing evidence” that the 6 January attack on the US Capitol by a pro-Trump mob was “a ‘false flag’ operation”.

The resolution, which was published on 19 January and was endorsed by the executive committee of the state Republican party, suggested that the storming of the capitol by Trump supporters was an orchestrated conspiracy “designed to discredit President Trump, his supporters and all conservative Republicans,” and to create a “sham motivation” to impeach the former president.

Meanwhile, the Hawaii GOP is RTing QAnon sh*t and telling people to listen to holocaust denying YouTubers.

In five years, Alex Jones will be a moderate Republican, mark my words.

EDIT: I was going to say something earlier about how Republicans have twisted and weaponized the term "Cancel Culture," and then I saw Matt Gaetz's Tweet and we are at most two years away from them saying that losing an election is Cancel Culture.

Prederick wrote:

They're not getting any saner.

The Oregon Republican party has falsely claimed in a resolution that there is “growing evidence” that the 6 January attack on the US Capitol by a pro-Trump mob was “a ‘false flag’ operation”.

The resolution, which was published on 19 January and was endorsed by the executive committee of the state Republican party, suggested that the storming of the capitol by Trump supporters was an orchestrated conspiracy “designed to discredit President Trump, his supporters and all conservative Republicans,” and to create a “sham motivation” to impeach the former president.

Meanwhile, the Hawaii GOP is RTing QAnon sh*t and telling people to listen to holocaust denying YouTubers.

In five years, Alex Jones will be a moderate Republican, mark my words.

EDIT: I was going to say something earlier about how Republicans have twisted and weaponized the term "Cancel Culture," and then I saw Matt Gaetz's Tweet and we are at most two years away from them saying that losing an election is Cancel Culture.

I accidentally starting reading the related tweets. What a cesspool Republican twitter is.

Prederick wrote:

EDIT: I was going to say something earlier about how Republicans have twisted and weaponized the term "Cancel Culture," and then I saw Matt Gaetz's Tweet and we are at most two years away from them saying that losing an election is Cancel Culture.

The irony is that Republicans have long been masters at cancel culture considering how they've convinced a whole lot of folks that Democrats aren't even real Americans.

I swear I remember something about the Dixie Chicks...

Prederick wrote:

Hawley's got a new op-ed in the New York Post titled "It's time to stand up against the muzzling of America," and, to quote Paleo:

Removed by a moderator.

The entirely predictable results after one news cycle.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/fHL7nVU.png)