Republicans: continued

[Sean Hayden]

You get free food for 3 months. Then limits set in:

If you are age 18–49, able to work, and don’t have any dependents, you might need to meet both the general work requirements and an additional work requirement for ABAWDs to get SNAP for more than 3 months in 3 years

Work at least 80 hours a month. Work can be for pay, for goods or services (for something other than money), unpaid, or as a volunteer;
Participate in a work program at least 80 hours a month. A work program could be SNAP Employment and Training or another federal, state, or local work program;

In other words you’re required to do a bit of paperwork once a month. It’s probably all online by now though, right?

[pErvinalia]

80 hours doesn't sound like paperwork.

[Sean Hayden]

Paperwork says all kinds of things, and these requirements are just another form of paperwork. I wouldn’t believe half of it.

[pErvinalia]

Maybe ask some of the people affected by it.

[Sean Hayden]

I'm not passing judgement here. I've been on the program myself.

--//--

Didn't you have to provide evidence you were looking for a job at one point? I can't remember, but would anyone be surprised to learn you had merely listed several companies?

--//--

These requirements are stupid. Politicians say they want to get everyone a job even as their economists believe doing so would be a mistake. They work to keep x number of people unemployed, but when you are it's assumed there's something wrong with you. It's total bullshit. Everything is, or so much anyway. It's no surprise then that we find the bullshit in the paperwork too. Everyone is trapped, so they do what they feel they have to.

[L'Emmerdeur]

The horrible mean nasty woke socialists are making life so difficult!

'When Did the "F*ck Your Feelings" Crowd Get So Triggered?'

Being a conservative these days sounds emotionally exhausting.

At any given moment, you might find out, for instance, that your favorite light beer sent a brew to a transgendered influencer and get so mad about it you have to film yourself using that beer for target practice. Or you might discover—gasp!—that Target is selling T-shirts with little rainbows on them for Pride Month and simply have no choice but drive to the nearest Target, threaten employees with violence, write a song about it, and whine that the song is being censored. Perhaps your precious children are being exposed to a poem about unity, or a movie about a mythical creature that isn't white, so you do whatever it takes to shield them from these horrors. Maybe you heard someone say their pronouns and subsequently fainted in the middle of a PTA meeting.

That’s just how it goes in the United States of Wokemerica. Another day, another space that is not safe.

...

The focus on triggering the libs was meant to suggest a powerful truth about the world order—that people so sensitive and volatile were unfit to hold the majority in a tough world that demands a thicker skin. Reacting in any way to a cruel provocation designed explicitly to incite extreme reactions was perceived as weakness, hysteria, virtue signaling, or—paradoxically—all of the above. The term “Trump Derangement Syndrome” eventually emerged to describe the lib-who-cried-wolf types who panicked over everything. But nothing was considered appropriately triggering. No matter what liberals were upset about, the standard response was to act as if the outrage was due to Hillary Clinton’s face not yet being emblazoned on the dollar bill.

It’s hard to pin down exactly when this dynamic changed. The Trump administration didn’t exactly run like a fine-tuned machine, so election-triumphant MAGA trolls quickly found themselves on the defensive and stayed there. When a Turning Point USA activist walked around a college campus wearing a diaper, ostensibly to show libs what babies they are, the broader lib-triggering posture curdled into caricature. And though prominent MAGA players like CPAC chair Matt Schlapp would later go on to crack weird jokes about Nancy Pelosi’s husband getting attacked with a hammer, back then they made a huge deal about the line-crossing incivility of a comedian being too mean to Trump’s press secretary. Not exactly alpha behavior.

The true end of the “melting the snowflakes” moment arrived with the Jan. 6 insurrection, one of the most triggered displays in American history. The still-persistent belief that Trump was cheated out of a second term may have been driven by disinformation, but it’s mainly fueled by feelings. A pollster explaining why 68 percent of Republicans still believe the 2020 election was stolen wrote in The Atlantic last year: “As a woman from Wisconsin told me, ‘I can’t really put my finger on it, but something just doesn’t feel right.’” Jan. 6 proved once and for all that “Fuck Your Feelings” never meant that feelings themselves were frivolous signs of weakness, only that yours are. My feelings, however—as a MAGA Republican—are sacrosanct pillars of strength.

The years since the insurrection have seen conservatives retreat into constant, shrieking victimhood. They wailed and virtue-signaled when the Dr. Seuss estate stopped publishing six of its titles, bemoaned the green M&M becoming slightly less fuckable, and worked themselves into a frothy lather over both the fictional threat of banning red meat and the merely floated possibility of phasing out gas stoves.

[Tero]

Congress to arrest/fire/do nothing to FBI director Wray
https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/01/ ... ettlement/

The 1023 document being demanded by Comer is among the products of that investigation.

A spokesperson for Raskin confirmed the Maryland Democrat will attend the briefing.

“Ranking Member Raskin has accepted the FBI’s invitation to review the subpoenaed document on Monday alongside Chairman Comer,” they said. “The Ranking Member appreciates the agency’s efforts to accommodate the committee and the opportunity to review and be briefed on the Trump Justice Department’s follow up on the unsubstantiated tip sheet after weeks of Chairman Comer’s partisan spin.”

[rasetsu]

Congress to arrest/fire/do nothing to FBI director Wray
https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/01/ ... ettlement/

The 1023 document being demanded by Comer is among the products of that investigation.

A spokesperson for Raskin confirmed the Maryland Democrat will attend the briefing.

“Ranking Member Raskin has accepted the FBI’s invitation to review the subpoenaed document on Monday alongside Chairman Comer,” they said. “The Ranking Member appreciates the agency’s efforts to accommodate the committee and the opportunity to review and be briefed on the Trump Justice Department’s follow up on the unsubstantiated tip sheet after weeks of Chairman Comer’s partisan spin.”

Bad link.

[Tero]

Try

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/06/02/poli ... index.html

[Tero]

WASHINGTON — House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., announced Monday that his panel will start proceedings to hold FBI Director Christopher Wray in contempt of Congress, a move the agency called "unwarranted."

The decision came after the FBI briefed Comer and Oversight Committee ranking member Jamie Raskin, D-Md., on Capitol Hill for more than an hour Monday and offered them the chance to review a document that purportedly describes an allegation that Joe Biden accepted a bribe as vice president.

Speaking to reporters outside the secure briefing site after, Comer said the "FBI again refused to hand over the unclassified record to the custody" of the committee. "And we will now initiate contempt of Congress hearings this Thursday."

"FBI officials confirmed that the unclassified FBI-generated record has not been disproven and is currently being used in an ongoing investigation," Comer said.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna87779

[L'Emmerdeur]

Republican presidential candidates apparently are agreed that trans people are an existential menace.

'"Untrue and Hateful": Nikki Haley Slammed for "Damnable Lie" of Blaming Teen Girls Contemplating Suicide on Trans Kids'

Asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper to define the term “woke” as conservatives see it, Haley, according to Mediaite, replied: “There’s a lot of things,” which seemed to define her responses to several of the questions she was asked.

“You want to start with biological boys playing in girl sports,” said the former Trump Ambassador to the United Nations, referring to transgender girls. “That’s one thing. The fact we have gender pronoun classes in the military now.”

NCRM could find no reference to “gender pronoun classes in the military” via a Google search, although at least one right-wing website has posted what allegedly is a U.S. Military training video on pronouns.

“All these things that are pushing what a small minority want on the majority of Americans, it’s too much,” Haley continued.

...

“My daughter ran track in high school. I don’t even know how I would have that conversation with her. How are we supposed to get our girls used to the fact that biological boys are in their locker room? And then we wonder why a third of our teenage girls seriously contemplated suicide last year.”

...

“There is no data, or study (anywhere) linking teen depression to presence of trans kids,” [NYU Professor Scott Galloway] writes. “This mocks a serious issue, and reinforces a GOP theme of demonizing our most vulnerable. The opposite of leadership.”

Boston Globe opinion writer Renée Graham went even further: “There isn’t a shred of evidence connecting suicidal ideation in teenage girls to being in close proximity to trans girls. None. An ugly, damnable lie and exactly what one should expect from Haley.”

[pErvinalia]

Republicans have no shame. They are a hate party.

[JimC]

The worry is that the hate their spokespeople publicly exhibit in such interviews must also exist within a substantial enough group of American voters for the public posturing to be politically worthwhile...

[Sean Hayden]

I don’t think we’re wired to solve conflict so much as use it to get a better seat at the show.

[Brian Peacock]

The thing with trying to push the Overton Window ever further to the right (or left) is that you invariably end up pushing past where your standing, and thus make yourself the target of your own rhetoric.