Rhetorical question, surely, but obviously the answer is approximately 70% of voters. Bonehead-level stupid strategy courting this tiny fragment of voters. Women of voting age are around 50% of voters (sick of our rights to be counted as human persons threatened), LGBTQ+ are nearly 10% (sick of their right to merely exist being threatened) and then there are men who don’t completely suck (you’re not exactly “woke” per se, but you know shit has gone pear-shaped).
It’s beyond time to pander to the people who actually vote for progress.
So we’re living with a dominant political party who may end up ‘OK with’ a representative (Gaetz) suddenly abandoning his House seat (and the voters who put him there) entirely to escape a legal ethics probe into sex trafficking so that he can go and be appointed as attorney general for the entire united states. There is no bottom to the ethical squalor of these foul scums! and still they get voted into office. @#$@!!!
I hope she’s right… The “moderate” republicans keep making behind the scenes noise about Trump and then most of them never do shit about it, because staying in power clearly means more to them than anything else. I hope they’ve finally grown a spine, but I don’t know if we should hold our breathes considering how they’ve kept doing this for years now with regards to Trump… In my more paranoid moments, I do wonder if they are really all in lock-step, but leaking “dissent” narratives to make it seem otherwise… At this point, I really don’t know. They knew who he was going into all this and they STILL backed him on the Republican ticket…
I think some of them are in rock/hard place. They back him because he’s so popular with voters (and the election proved they were correct), but they’re also leery of backing him because his stated policies are not popular, and could lose them support back home.
Which of the two is more important to act on must be a tough calculus for their anti-education brains.
The issue they are faced with, and it is a damnation of their own making, is that his cult of personality does not transfer to others. He can do things that hurt his base and they love him for it. Others will get crucified for the exact same thing. I suspect that they will get crucified for doing the things he tells them to do, and also if they don’t obey him. They put themselves in this place, and I have no sympathy at all. Especially when the only remaining question is how many of my friends and loved ones are going to be hurt by their fuckery. If they get blasted, I will be cheering.
The fact that Republican Senators didn’t make Rick Scott their Majority leader gives me a tiny glimmer of hope, but there are a few very important differences between that and the Gaetz nomination:
It was a secret ballot, which won’t be the case for confirmation votes.
Several Trump allies pushed for Scott but Trump himself was uncharacteristically silent on the matter, so Republican Senators weren’t going against him directly.
Picking a majority leader is something done entirely within the Senate, with no formal role for the President (or President-elect) to play at all. But many Senators have historically treated the “advise and consent” role for nominations as little more than a rubber-stamp formality, at least when their own party is in power.
Indeed… but their ACTIONS tell me that they don’t care about democracy, even if they performatively act as if they do. Any Republicans that did not fully break with Trump after Jan. 6th is part of the problem, whatever they really believe.
can the far-right echo chamber be positively eroded by a proper application of “Poe’s Law” on steroids? …here’s hoping. (“You know how we pranked 'em with a church with Lara Trump cradling an AK-47 as the new Pietà? …well, there’s a queue that goes round the block.” -sigh-)
The satirical website will relaunch InfoWars with a “relentless barrage of humor for good.”
Thomas Maxwell
Infowars has been acquired by satirical news site The Onion. Joe Buglewicz / Getty
For once, the “funniest possible outcome” is not an exaggeration. The Onion, the satirical news website that started as a newspaper in the 1980s, says it won a bankruptcy auction to acquire InfoWars, the fringe right-wing website founded in 1999 and run by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. …
I’m inclined to agree. Slow-playing the criminal investigations and prosecutions of T**** turns out to have been a bad move, not to mention the lack of pushing the enforcement of 14A sec3.
He was always gonna be a schmuck. His SC nomination was because the Dems didn’t have a Senate majority, and so Obama had to pick someone that both he and McConnell could swallow. Just because he wasn’t enough of a schmuck to suit McConnell doesn’t mean he wasn’t still too much of a schmuck to be trusted to do the right thing later on. There is a sizable Schmuck Gap there these days.
