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Quote:

Originally Posted by tw2113

I assume many of the GOP crazies are just in a huddle planning out their next crazies moves

From Demand Progress:

Quote:

On Inauguration Day last week, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock were sworn in, giving Democrats the majority in the U.S. Senate.

But Mitch McConnell is already planning to strangle the entire Biden agenda before it's even begun.

COVID-19 relief. Immigration reform. Health care. Tax reform. Voting rights. McConnell wants to stop it all unless Democrats shut him down and end the filibuster.

The first days of Biden’s administration have been historic. The president has reentered us into the Paris Climate Accord, returned collective bargaining power to federal workers, stopped the U.S.’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization, and ended the Muslim ban. (1)

But if we are going to see other promises Biden made come to fruition, like coronavirus relief funds, $15 minimum wage, and green jobs for infrastructure, Congress must pass the legislation needed without waiting weeks or months in vain for Republicans to come around.

None of that has a chance of happening if McConnell uses the filibuster to hold up legislation, like he did with more than 400 bills in the last year alone. (2)

We cannot afford to wait any longer. We cannot let Senate Democrats allow McConnell to undermine progress. Justice delayed is justice denied.

DONATE

Sources:

1. CNN, "Here are the 30 executive orders and actions Biden signed in his first three days," January 24, 2021
2. The American Independent, "McConnell is blocking 400 bills Americans want — but he's rushing a Supreme Court pick," September 22, 2020

Things are not boring (I wish they were, Skuj); they're critical.

They can be boring and critical.

Covid updates by our Health Minister: Boring. And critical.

Oh look: Apocalypse Fuckface knows best, as always.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/30/u...peachment.html

It is very clear that maybe 5 Repukes, tops, will side with Dems on this upcoming trial. That's fine with me! Let history record the vote, and let Trump continue to dominate the Repukes for god knows how long. The Repukes had a chance to turn a page with this, but they don't have the balls.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Skuj

Oh look: Apocalypse Fuckface knows best, as always.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/30/u...peachment.html

Update: https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/...r-resignations

Are these clowns going to go the "election hoax" route that failed 60+ times already? I need popcorn!

GOP’s McConnell blasts ‘loony lies’ by Ga. Rep. Greene

By BRIAN SLODYSKO
an hour ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell denounced newly elected Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene on Monday, calling the far-right Georgia Republican’s embrace of conspiracy theories and “loony lies” a “cancer for the Republican Party.”

“Somebody who’s suggested that perhaps no airplane hit the Pentagon on 9/11, that horrifying school shootings were pre-staged, and that the Clintons crashed JFK Jr.’s airplane is not living in reality,” said McConnell, R-Ky. “This has nothing to do with the challenges facing American families or the robust debates on substance that can strengthen our party.”

The statement comes as House Democrats are mounting an effort to formally rebuke Greene, who has a history of making racist remarks, embracing conspiracy theories and endorsing violence directed at Democrats. It also puts pressure on House Republican leaders to discipline her.

Democrats have teed up action Wednesday to send a resolution to the House floor that would strip Greene of assignments on the House education and budget committees, if House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., doesn’t do so first.

“It is my hope and expectation that Republicans will do the right thing and hold Rep. Greene accountable, and we will not need to consider this resolution,” said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md. “But we are prepared to do so if necessary.”

read the rest here:
https://apnews.com/article/race-and-...0a5d9511801795

^ SNL's cold open from a coupla nights ago was probably the last straw. ;)

Seriously, though... From The New York Times:

Quote:

It’s Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Party Now

She embarrasses some Republicans, but she’s no outlier.

By Michelle Goldberg
Opinion Columnist
Feb. 1, 2021, 7:35 p.m. ET

Steve King, the Republican former congressman from Iowa, must feel robbed. Two years ago, he was stripped of all his committee assignments after asking, in an interview with The New York Times, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” The Republican Party threw its weight behind King’s primary challenger, and he was whisked off the national stage, no longer to embarrass colleagues who prefer that racist demagogy be performed with enough finesse to allow for plausible deniability.

Since then, standards have changed. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, is every bit as bigoted as King, and 10 times as unhinged. By now, you’ve surely heard her theory that California wildfires might have been caused by a space laser controlled by Jewish bankers. That wasn’t Greene’s first foray into anti-Semitism; in 2018 she shared a notorious white nationalist video in which a Holocaust denier claimed that “Zionist supremacists have schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation.”

Recently, Greene met with a far-right British commentator, Katie Hopkins, who has described migrants as “cockroaches” and said she doesn’t care if they die. Greene told her, “I would love to trade you for some of our white people here that have no appreciation for our country.” She described the results of the 2018 midterms as “an Islamic invasion of our government.” Greene endorsed calls for the execution of prominent Democrats and agreed with Facebook posts claiming that the Parkland and Sandy Hook school shootings were hoaxes. She harassed one of the Parkland massacre’s young survivors.

As it happens, this week House Republicans are seeking to punish a prominent woman in their ranks — but it’s not Greene. A big chunk of the House Republican caucus is reportedly trying to oust Liz Cheney of Wyoming from leadership because she voted to impeach Donald Trump for inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House leader, is meeting with Greene, but it’s far from clear that he’ll act against her, because she represents much of their party’s base. When The New Yorker’s Charles Bethea met a group of Greene’s local supporters last year, they were generally familiar with QAnon, and several agreed that Democrats are controlled by Satan. There’s a reason Kelly Loeffler, who needed to get out the pro-Trump vote, touted Greene’s endorsement when she was trying to hold on to her Georgia Senate seat.

Some decent Republicans imagine they’re in a battle for their party’s soul. Representative Adam Kinzinger, who like Cheney voted to impeach Trump, recently started a PAC devoted to fighting the forces that led to Greene’s rise and the Capitol rampage. “The time has come to choose what kind of party we will be,” he said in an introductory video. The thing is, Republicans already have chosen.

Just look at the party’s state affiliates. On Jan. 4, the Arizona G.O.P. retweeted a “Stop the Steal” activist who’d pronounced himself willing to “give my life” to overturn the election. Said the party’s official account: “He is. Are you?” An Arizona lawmaker has since introduced a bill that would let the Legislature, controlled by Republicans, override the presidential vote of the state’s increasingly Democratic citizenry.

The Oregon Republican Party approved a resolution suggesting that the Capitol siege was a “false flag” attack. The Texas Republican Party has adopted the QAnon slogan “We are the storm” as its motto, though it insists there’s no connection. The chairman of Wyoming’s Republican Party, who attended Trump’s rally on Jan. 6, said he might be open to secession.

Greene is not the outlier in this party. Kinzinger is.

American conservatism — particularly its evangelical strain — has fostered derangement in its ranks for decades, insisting that no source of information outside its own self-reinforcing ideological bubble is trustworthy.

If you’re steeped in creationism and believe that elites are lying to you about the origins of life on earth, it’s not a stretch to believe they’re lying to you about a life-threatening virus. If what you know of history is the revisionist version of the Christian right, in which God deeded America to the faithful, then pluralism will feel like the theft of your birthright. If you believe that the last Democratic president was illegitimate, as Trump and other birthers claimed, then it’s not hard to believe that dark forces would foist another unconstitutional leader on the country.

There was a moment, after the Capitol riot, when it seemed as if a critical mass of the Republican Party was recoiling at what it had created. But the moment passed, because it would have required the party’s putative leaders to defy too many of their followers. Senator Mitch McConnell floated openness to convicting Trump in a Senate trial, but ended up voting that such a trial was unconstitutional. Fox News, finger to the wind, purged many of its real journalists and gave the conspiracy theorist Maria Bartiromo a prime-time tryout.

On Monday Politico reported that if Republicans don’t strip Greene of committee assignments, Democrats will try to do it, bringing the issue to the House floor. Republican members will have the chance to distance themselves from her. If they don’t, it will be because they know she belongs.

Paul Krugman's NYT column:

Quote:

The Republican economic plan is an insult

This time the Democrats must realize what Lucy plans to do with the football.

By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
Feb. 1, 2021, 5:53 p.m.

So 10 Republican senators are proposing an economic package that is supposed to be an alternative to President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan. The proposal would reportedly be only a fraction of the size of Biden’s plan and would in important ways cut the heart out of economic relief.

Republicans, however, want Biden to give in to their wishes in the name of bipartisanship. Should he?

No, no, 1.9 trillion times no.

It’s not just that what we know about the GOP proposal indicates that it’s grotesquely inadequate for a nation still ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic. Beyond that, by their behavior — not just over the past few months but going back a dozen years — Republicans have forfeited any right to play the bipartisanship card, or even to be afforded any presumption of good faith.

Let’s start with the substance.

By any measure, January was the worst pandemic month so far. More than 95,000 Americans died of COVID-19; hospitalizations remain far higher than they were at previous peaks.

True, the end of the nightmare is finally in sight. If all goes well, at some point this year enough people will have been vaccinated that we’ll reach herd immunity, the pandemic will fade away and normal life can resume. But that’s unlikely to happen before late summer or early fall.

And in the meantime we’re going to have to remain on partial lockdown. It would, for example, be folly to reopen full-scale indoor dining. And the continuing lockdown will impose a lot of financial hardship. Unemployment will remain very high; millions of businesses will struggle to stay afloat; state and local governments, which aren’t allowed to run deficits, will be in dire fiscal straits.

What we need, then, is disaster relief to get afflicted Americans through the harsh months ahead. And that’s what the Biden plan would do.

Republicans, however, want to rip the guts out of this plan. They are seeking to reduce extra aid to the unemployed and, more important, cut that aid off in June — long before we can possibly get back to full employment. They want to eliminate hundreds of billions in aid to state and local governments. They want to eliminate aid for children. And so on.

This isn’t an offer of compromise; it’s a demand for near-total surrender. And the consequences would be devastating if Democrats were to give in.

But what about bipartisanship? As Biden might say, “C’mon, man.”

First of all, a party doesn’t get to demand bipartisanship when many of its representatives still won’t acknowledge that Biden won legitimately, and even those who eventually acknowledged the Biden victory spent weeks humoring baseless claims of a stolen election.

Complaints that it would be “divisive” for Democrats to pass a relief bill on a party-line vote, using reconciliation to bypass the filibuster, are also pretty rich coming from a party that did exactly that in 2017, when it enacted a large tax cut — legislation that, unlike pandemic relief, wasn’t a response to any obvious crisis but was simply part of a conservative wish list.

Oh, and that tax cut was rammed through in the face of broad public opposition: Only 29% of Americans approved of the bill, while 56% disapproved. By contrast, the main provisions of the Biden plan are very popular: 79% of the public approve of new stimulus checks, and 69% approve of both expanded unemployment benefits and aid to state and local governments.

So when one party is trying to pursue policies with overwhelming public support while the other offers lock-step opposition, who, exactly, is being divisive?

Wait, there’s more.

Everyone knew that Republicans, who abruptly stopped caring about deficits when Donald Trump took office, would suddenly rediscover the horror of debt under Joe Biden. What even I didn’t expect was to see them complain that Biden’s plan gives too much help to relatively affluent families.

Again, consider the 2017 tax cut. According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, that bill gave 79% of its benefits to people making more than $100,000 a year. It gave more to Americans with million-dollar-plus incomes, just 0.4% of taxpayers, than the total tax break for those living on less than $75,000 a year, that is, a majority of the population. And now Republicans claim to care about equity?

In short, everything about this Republican counteroffer reeks of bad faith — the same kind of bad faith the GOP displayed in 2009 when it tried to block President Barack Obama’s efforts to rescue the economy after the 2008 financial crisis.

Obama, unfortunately, failed to grasp the nature of his opposition and watered down his policies in a vain attempt to win support across the aisle. This time, it seems as if Democrats understand what Lucy will do with that football and won’t be fooled again.

So it’s OK for Biden to talk with Republicans and hear them out. But should he make any substantive concessions in an attempt to win them over? Should he let negotiations with Republicans delay the passage of his rescue plan? Absolutely not. Just get it done.

Breaking News :

Penis cake baker no longer a candidate of Islamic party

Why she wanted to be part of that party in the first place is beyond me. She's not even Islamic ...

From The New York Times:

Quote:

Marjorie Taylor Greene Apologized and Got a Standing Ovation. Seriously.

Once again, the party of personal responsibility declines to hold the person responsible.

By Michelle Cottle
Ms. Cottle is a member of the editorial board.
Feb. 4, 2021

The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, issued a plaintive plea to his troops on Wednesday: Can’t we all just get along?

Congressional Republicans had two delicate items on their midweek to-do list involving the possible punishment of their own members:

1. Vote on whether to oust from leadership Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the chamber’s No. 3 Republican, over her vote to impeach Donald Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol siege. “There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution,” Ms. Cheney had asserted on the eve of impeachment, provoking wrath among Trump loyalists.

2. Decide whether to strip committee assignments from Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the conspiracy theory-embracing, race-baiting freshman from Georgia, who, pre-Congress, spent her time on social media indulging right-wing rants about killing prominent Democratic officials and agents of the so-called deep state.

In the matter of Ms. Cheney, Republicans declined to bow to their Trumpian cultists. During a conference meeting in the bowels of the Capitol Wednesday, Ms. Cheney refused to apologize for backing impeachment, even when members of the Freedom Caucus accused her of “aiding the enemy.” After some four hours of debate, the conference voted decisively, 145 to 61, to keep her as its chairwoman. That the balloting was secret enabled some of the more spinally challenged members to vote their conscience.

With Ms. Greene, the party’s fringe carried the day. Mr. McCarthy issued a statement assuring the public that the poison conspiracy theories she had peddled “do not represent the values or beliefs of the House Republican Conference.” And Ms. Greene apologized to colleagues for some of her battier statements and for putting the conference in a tough political spot. For this, she received a standing ovation.

In the end, Republicans refused to take any concrete action against her. They instead left it to the full House to vote Thursday on a resolution put forward by Democrats to remove Ms. Greene from two committees. The House voted 230 to 199 to do so, with 11 Republicans voting with Democrats.

This dodge allowed Mr. McCarthy to denounce the move as a “partisan power grab” by Democrats, while he and others hawk the usual slippery-slope gibberish. If they come for Ms. Greene today, they warn, what’s to stop them for coming for other Republicans tomorrow?

On the surface, these moves — or lack thereof — appear to pull in different directions. But they have the shared aim of preserving the fraying ties between the party’s angry, Trumpist base and its more traditional wing. “We need to unite for us to take the majority and govern,” Mr. McCarthy reportedly urged in defending Ms. Cheney.

There’s nothing unusual about this kind of big tent strategy. Such an approach was central to President Biden’s campaign and to House Democrats’ winning the majority in 2018. The key distinction here is that Republicans are making room in their tent not only for differing views on policy and politics but also for alternative versions of reality.

During the rules committee’s discussion of Ms. Greene on Wednesday, Republicans are said to have expressed distress at her behavior, but also argued against rushing to judgment. “We ought to follow a process that will allow us in a deliberative way to establish the facts and discuss the implications and move from there,” said Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, according to The Washington Post.

Deliberation is a wonderful thing. But among the pile of already established facts are videos of Ms. Greene holding forth on some of the most unhinged fictions percolating on the internet. In her social media postings, she has even endorsed the “frazzledrip” conspiracy theory. Warning: Do not Google that one if you have a weak stomach.

In his statement, Mr. McCarthy said he had made clear to Ms. Greene that “as a member of Congress we have a responsibility to hold ourselves to a higher standard than how she presented herself as a private citizen.” In a speech on the House floor Thursday, before the vote on the resolution, she acknowledged that the Sept. 11 attacks “absolutely happened” and that “school shootings are absolutely real” and insisted that she had walked away from QAnon — even as she charged that the media “is just as guilty as QAnon of presenting truth and lies.” Going forward, it will be interesting to see if the congresswoman expresses public contrition for the harm she has caused, or at the very least stops fund-raising off the controversy.

Some Senate Republicans have made their concerns public, including the minority leader, Mitch McConnell. On Monday, he cautioned that “loony lies and conspiracy theories” are a “cancer for the Republican Party.” Without naming names, he noted, “Somebody who’s suggested that perhaps no airplane hit the Pentagon on 9/11, that horrifying school shootings were pre-staged and that the Clintons crashed J.F.K. Jr.’s airplane is not living in reality.”

Or as Senator Thomas Tillis, the North Carolina Republican, tweeted: “It’s not conservative, it’s insane.”

Like Mr. McConnell, Mr. McCarthy is a political creature. He has few, if any, discernible values beyond his own ambitions. Unlike Mr. McConnell, Mr. McCarthy is weak and worries too much about being liked. He has neither the vision nor the stomach to play the long game.

This may keep members of his conference placated for now. But it bodes ill for the efforts of serious-minded Republicans to reclaim their party from the MAGAverse.

This stupid bitch Greene DID say/post those things in the past, and no amount of apologising or backpedalling will erase this fact.

If Trump did one good thing, we might say that he broke up the GOP. (Everything that Trump touches turns to shit.) Now the looney Trumpies can fuck off somewhere, while the GOP tries to stop being the Party Of Stupid.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Skuj

Now the looney Trumpies can fuck off somewhere, while the GOP tries to stop being the Party Of Stupid.

Except they're not trying. Eleven votes? Come on. They fear Trump's constituency, they want Trump's constituency, and they're kowtowing to Trump's constituency.

"Is you is or is you ain't my constichuency?!"

From The New York Times:

Quote:

Why Are Republican Presidents So Bad for the Economy?

G.D.P., jobs and other indicators have all risen faster under Democrats for nearly the past century.

This is hilarious (in an unintended "laugh to keep from crying" way). Scroll down and you'll see two graphics: "Annual G.D.P. growth rate" and "Annual growth rate of nonfarm jobs". On each you can check their evolution by clicking on "Start of term", "Six months later", and "Year later". Both show Orange Putsch at the bottom, but not only that - he's the only one who starts his own "economic clock" in the negative... and then it gets fucking worse!

But hey, tax cuts, to the economy they're like rocket fuel. Or cyanide or summat.

From Fareed Zakaria's newsletter. Click on the link to check out the study, it's quite interesting (and it is a study, not another opinion column):

Quote:

They Don't Look Like Extremists

Just who stormed the US Capitol? Though members of extremist groups were present, Robert A. Pape and Keven Ruby write for The Atlantic that after leading an in-depth study of 193 people charged criminally, they've found the Jan. 6 mob didn't resemble typical extremists.

"The average age of the arrestees we studied is 40," Pape and Ruby note. "Two-thirds are 35 or older, and 40 percent are business owners or hold white-collar jobs. Unlike the stereotypical extremist, many of the alleged participants in the Capitol riot have a lot to lose. They work as CEOs, shop owners, doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, and accountants. Strikingly, court documents indicate that only 9 percent are unemployed. … [M]ost of the insurrectionists do not come from deep-red strongholds ... more than half came from counties that [President Joe] Biden won."

The riot, Pape and Ruby conclude, "revealed a new force in American politics": a "mass political movement that has violence at its core and draws strength even from places where Trump supporters are in the minority."

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Soup Nazi

Except they're not trying. Eleven votes? Come on. They fear Trump's constituency, they want Trump's constituency, and they're kowtowing to Trump's constituency.

"Is you is or is you ain't my constichuency?!"

These things take time. We all know that Trump will not be convicted at this next impeachment. But eventually, the GOP needs a 2024 candidate. I believe that candidate will speak in full sentences, and will not be Trumpified.

I wish I could believe that.

Quote:

Originally Posted by d.sound

I wish I could believe that.

Yeah, we sure have many reasons to doubt that. But I believe that even the GOP will soon realize that this 4 year experiment has failed. They will fracture, of course. But the Trumpy Faction will not be the standard 35-40% that we saw during Trumpworld.

I don't know if I mentioned this yet, but isn't it absolute poetic justice that Merrick Garland will be AG? As AG he will have more influence than he ever would have had on SCOTUS.

Take that, Mitch Fucking McConnell!!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Skuj

I don't know if I mentioned this yet, but isn't it absolute poetic justice that Merrick Garland will be AG? As AG he will have more influence than he ever would have had on SCOTUS.

Not for life he won't. :(

Quote:

Originally Posted by Skuj

https://thehill.com/homenews/adminis...-income-during

Nepotism Barbie and Nepotism Ken, as Ana Navarro called them...