Republicans

[Tero]

Governor wants to know if AG candidate is a lesbo
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/ ... 2?lo=ap_e1

[L'Emmerdeur]

Family values, conservative principles, and whatever.

'Grand jury indicts Missouri governor who admitted affair'

A St. Louis grand jury on Thursday indicted Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens on a felony invasion of privacy charge for allegedly taking a compromising photo of a woman with whom he had an affair in 2015. The Republican governor responded that he made a mistake but committed no crime.

St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner launched an investigation in January after Greitens admitted to an affair with his St. Louis hairdresser that began in March 2015. He was elected governor in November 2016.

Thursday's indictment was followed with an announcement by House Republican leaders that they were forming a group of lawmakers to investigate the charges "and answer the question as to whether or not the governor can lead our state while a felony case moves forward."

[Seabass]

Black Republican and former RNC chairman finds out party might be racist.

Former RNC chair responds to comment about his race and position

Former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele said he was shocked, disappointed and surprised after a spokesman for the Conservative Political Action Conference said Steele was elected to the position "because he was a black guy, that was the wrong thing to do."

[Tero]

Republican heresy!

Still, Herbert said, he wasn’t keen on Trump’s proposal to arm teachers, but is open to raising the legal purchase age on assault rifles from 18 to 21—“maybe there’s something that says wisdom comes along, and common sense enhances as you get older,” he said.

He also said he’d like to see restrictions on magazine size for rifles, acknowledging that this puts him in a different place than many in the Republican Party.

“I don’t know that there’s any reason to have anything more than a seven or nine shot magazine,” Herbert said. “Once you get past a typical size when you go out hunting, you’re probably having excess baggage you don’t need.”

and one wonders what is to become of Trump and Romney. The 1% rule? All they need is the Koch Brothers and nothing will stop them then. We will be eating coal.

[pErvinalia]

Black Republican and former RNC chairman finds out party might be racist.

Former RNC chair responds to comment about his race and position

Former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele said he was shocked, disappointed and surprised after a spokesman for the Conservative Political Action Conference said Steele was elected to the position "because he was a black guy, that was the wrong thing to do."

Dumb cunt.

[pErvinalia]

We will be eating coal.

Welcome to Australian politics..

[Tero]

WASHINGTON—Saying the CNN town hall debate had left him sexually aroused in a way he hadn’t experienced since his failed 2016 presidential run, Florida senator Marco Rubio admitted Friday that he was still rock-hard a couple days after being publicly humiliated on the national stage. “Oh, fuck yes, I had forgotten how good it hurts to be degraded on live television for everyone to see,” said Rubio, noting that the Parkland shooting survivors taking him to task for his complicity combined with the booing crowd gave him a raging erection more turgid than the one he had when Chris Christie totally destroyed him during a Republican debate two years ago. “It was so intense when those town hall participants asked me to stop accepting donations from the NRA and I just squirmed around like the naughty boy I am. Then when Jake Tapper told everyone to settle down, I just about creamed my pants right there on stage. Mmm, I bet Americans are so disgusted with me. Jesus, I think I’m gonna blow a load.” Rubio added that if the survivors don’t stop roasting him on Twitter soon, he would have to visit a doctor for his aching cock.
(The Onion)

[Tero]

Conservatism with its boring cut taxes message was dying. Trump with racism, guns and nationalism revived it. Republicans now know exactly who votes for them:
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story ... 018-217081

[Tero]

From that link:

Charen’s outpouring of dissent accentuated how quickly and completely CPAC has become a pro-Trump gathering, just two years removed from him skipping the event because of a planned walk-out among conservatives who opposed his candidacy. Late Friday morning, with a standing-room-only ballroom full of conservative activists thundering down applause, Trump told of the “horrendous” immigrants taking advantage of our visa lottery system. He warned of dangerous and unproductive people arriving via “chain migration.” And then, underscoring these threats, the president dusted off “The Snake,” a ballad he often recited on the campaign trail, which likens immigrants welcomed by America to a venomous serpent that bites and kills the woman who took it in.

It seemed to set a tone. Gaffney, invited back to CPAC after being banished from the event for years, warned that most of the Chinese nationals in the United States are here to spy on Americans. A short while later, Rick Ungar, a left-wing radio host whom Schlapp invited for a panel discussion, was booed when he described a naturalization ceremony—and again when he said that Mexican immigrants have “more in common” with conservatives than liberals. That night, Schlapp’s communications director, Ian Walters, stunned attendees of the event’s trademark Ronald Reagan Dinner by saying the Republican National Committee elected Michael Steele as chairman in 2009 “because he’s a black guy.”


....What does that have to do with him being black? “The point was that he was not necessarily a great chairman,” Schlapp replied slowly.

This dynamic is amplified when it comes to Trump. At one point in our conversation, as he defended his speaking lineup, Schlapp said, “You have a president, who nobody would say came from the fringe, who is wildly popular and came here.” Certainly, there is no debating Trump's good standing among the CPAC faithful; there is also no debating that Trump promulgated the falsehood that Barack Obama was born in Africa, appeared on Infowars as a guest of Alex Jones and accused Ted Cruz’s father of being complicit in John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

Schlapp came under siege in 2017 for asking former Breitbart provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at CPAC. (He rescinded the invitation when video footage surfaced of the openly gay Yiannopoulos endorsing pedophilia.) Schlapp faced similar outrage this year, and not just over Le Pen. Conference organizers were skewered for inviting Pamela Geller, who has been barred from past CPACs due to her incendiary rhetoric about Islam, and Jim Hoft, whose “Gateway Pundit” blog recently attacked students from Parkland High School who spoke in favor of gun control after the mass shooting at their school on Valentine's Day. (This prompted Matt Lewis, a onetime CPAC “blogger of the year,” to pose the question: “Why is CPAC Afraid of Real Conservatives?”) Both Geller and Hoft were slated to participate in a panel on free speech; Geller quit when she came under pressure from the panel’s sponsor, the American Principles Project, to drop Hoft. When the revised panel on tech censorship concluded, and the APP moderator asked for audience questions, a young woman asked angrily why Hoft himself was being censored. Other attendees erupted in agreement.

These days, Steele said, “the sideshow is on the main stage.” This has meant a blurred line between patriotism and nativism. It has also meant provocation over policy: On Friday morning, National Rifle Association spokeswoman Dana Loesch said that “many in legacy media love mass shootings,” adding, “Crying white mothers are ratings gold.” A bit later, before Trump spoke, Fox News host Laura Ingraham quipped, ”Liberals are kind of like herpes. Just when you think you have them beat, they come back again.”

Young men in Trump hats:
Ben Rauff, a 19-year-old freshman at Kansas State University, had nearly identical responses. Conservatism, he said, is about “values,” with “a lot of nostalgia to it, harkening back to what things used to be like.” Trump, he said, has changed conservatism “by making people braver to say what’s on their mind.”

Erin McLaughlin, a freshman at Grove City College in western Pennsylvania, defined conservatism as “a set of core beliefs based on values that will never change—the right to life, individual rights.” And yet, she conceded, Trump has revised what it means to be conservative, even if only temporarily.

Youth is the lifeblood of CPAC. More than half of its attendees any given year are university students, giving the gathering its reputation for its all-night ragers and no-strings-attached romance. The college demographic also provides a built-in excuse for those on the right who have never been inclined to take the conference seriously. “This is a fun place to do all the radio shows and run into people in the halls, and for half of the people here who are college-age to see real-life congressmen, senators, presidents,” Grover Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform, told me Saturday morning. “They can see stars and see famous conservatives they see on TV. That’s what this is. Nobody is thinking through the modern conservative agenda at this conference.”

Yet in the era of Trump, with the core tenets of conservatism potentially evolving in real time, surveying these young activists took on greater urgency. In interviews with more than a dozen students here, I was struck by the near-uniformity of their responses to questions about conservatism and Trump’s effect on it. Three patterns emerged. First, they believe conservatism is defined by timeless principles—while acknowledging that Trump is changing the definition before our eyes. Second, their biggest concern with the president was over his proposed “amnesty” for illegal immigrants—even with concessions on border security and the wall, things they believe the White House is unlikely to achieve...

[Scot Dutchy]

ftl:nrl

[Tero]

Eveything is beautiful under Trump
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story ... ngs-217037

They pulled the only trick to keep them popular: cut taxes, sort of. Good for two years.

Meanwhile, Democrats do well at state level. Nationally, impotent.

[Tero]

Republicans: Trump enablers.
Atlantic:
Future generations of scholars will scrutinize the many weird ways that Trump has twisted the GOP. For present purposes, however, let’s focus on the party’s failure to restrain the president from two unforgivable sins. The first is his attempt to erode the independence of the justice system. This includes Trump’s sinister interactions with his law-enforcement apparatus: his demands for criminal investigations of his political opponents, his pressuring of law-enforcement leaders on investigative matters, his frank efforts to interfere with investigations that implicate his personal interests, and his threats against the individuals who run the Justice Department. It also includes his attacks on federal judges, his pardon of a sheriff convicted of defying a court’s order to enforce constitutional rights, his belief that he gets to decide on Twitter who is guilty of what crimes, and his view that the justice system exists to effectuate his will. Some Republicans have clucked disapprovingly at various of Trump’s acts. But in each case, many other Republicans have cheered, and the party, as a party, has quickly moved on. A party that behaves this way is not functioning as a democratic actor.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... op/550907/

[pErvinalia]

Since when do conservatives, let alone Republicans care about independence of the justice system??

[Tero]

It’s a little fuzzy. The use of a jury in court cases makes it seem like the system is fair. But poor blacks end up in jail whereas white wife beaters get a job from the pedophile president with the chain migrated in laws.

[Scot Dutchy]

It’s a little fuzzy. The use of a jury in court cases makes it seem like the system is fair. But poor blacks end up in jail whereas white wife beaters get a job from the pedophile president with the chain migrated in laws.

Juries are far from fair. The worst sort of courts but the Anglo-Saxon mind set cant appreciate that.