Republicans: continued

[pErvinalia]

That's Sethian. See my signature.

[Joe]

Damn! That is Sethian. Just the kind of hyperbole I'd expect of him.

Poor Cunt must miss him terribly.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Somebody who knows from proper counting of votes confirms the facts that the Arizona fraudit seeks to deny. The numbers tell the story, as if the two official audits of the votes in Arizona weren't enough.

'New analysis reveals one key reason Trump lost Arizona — and deflates his claim of "rigging"'

About 75,000 Republican-leaning voters in Arizona's two most populous counties did not vote to re-elect President Donald Trump in the 2020 election, according to an analysis of every vote cast by a longtime Arizona Republican Party election observer and election technologists familiar with vote-counting data.

The analysis from Maricopa and Pima Counties underscored that the Arizona state Senate's ongoing audit of 2.1 million ballots from Maricopa County's November 2020 election was based on a false premise—that Democrats stole Arizona's election where Trump lost statewide to Joe Biden by 10,457 votes.

"I am continuing my analysis of why Trump lost in Arizona," Benny White, a former military and commercial pilot who has been a Republican election observer for years in Pima County and was part of the research team, said in a May 10 Facebook post. "Bottom line: Republicans and non-partisans who voted for other Republicans on the ballot did not vote for Trump, some voted for Biden and some simply did not cast an effective vote for President."

The analysis, whose methodology is similar to academic research by political scientists, offers a counternarrative to Trump's continuing claims that he lost a rigged election. It also underscores that election experts can extract records from voting systems to affirm and explain the results, such as showing that at least 75,000 Arizonans voted for many other GOP candidates but not for Trump.

Maricopa County and Pima County accounted for 76 percent of Arizona's 2020 presidential election ballots.

"The data is all there to form a justified belief that there wasn't anything amiss, and you should be looking at that [data] before you turn ballots over to partisan third parties," said Larry Moore, who founded Clear Ballot, a federally certified firm that helps local and state governments to count and verify election results, and helped White analyze fall 2020's vote patterns from the two counties.
...

The analysis was based on the "cast-vote record" of every vote on every ballot in the two counties, which White obtained in a public records request and analyzed. The state Senate's auditors, led by the pro-Trump contractor Cyber Ninjas, were given the same data in February, but have not used it to cross-reference the subtotals in their hand count of Maricopa County's presidential and U.S. Senate votes, audit officials told Voting Booth. Cyber Ninjas has not yet issued any findings about several audits it is supervising.

...

"The power of this [cast-vote record] analysis is dealing with the complete record of all votes and not just statistical estimates," Moore said. "This is not based on estimates. There are no confidence intervals. These numbers are based on 100 percent of all the voters voting."

Cyber Ninjas don't need no steenkin' data. They already know what they're going to find.

[Tero]

Republicans in GA to count mail votes for 4th time
https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1395934447988523009

at lest they don't get the voting machines, as they have to be scrapped after the Ninjas tamper with them.

[Tero]

GOP ousted all moderates. It started in 2012:
CNN
Kristol's magazine, having diverged from Trump-era orthodoxy, no longer exists. Of his earlier sources of reassurance: Boehner fled Congress to author a book decrying his colleagues' dysfunction; Romney has become a pariah as the only Republican senator who twice voted to convict Trump on impeachment charges.
Dent, now a CNN political commentator, quit the House after moderates like him became further marginalized. McConnell was shaken by violence inside the US Capitol for which he declared the defeated Republican President "practically and morally responsible."
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/23/politics ... index.html

[JimC]

It's the "I'm more devoted to Dear Leader than you!" syndrome...

[Tero]

Batty Susan Collins thinks..
https://news.yahoo.com/susan-collins-in ... 00434.html
"republicans" can work with Biden. But only if she means herself and Romney.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Some of this essay edges into hyperbole, but the phenomena it describes are real. The Republican Party has been retreating from reason since at least the Reagan era, and with Trump and Trumpist shitbirds like Greene and Gaetz it has stepped into different territory.

'The Republican Party and the End of Enlightenment'

The most egregious of Republican assaults on the modern world is its rejection of Reason. Reason is the way we know what we know. It is not through revelations from God, or the pronouncements of priests or monarchs as had been the case before the Enlightenment.

Reason as a process for discovering Truth started in the Scientific Revolution around 1550. It was so powerful a way of knowing the physical world, the philosophers of the Enlightenment adopted it for knowing—and improving—the social world. It became the foundation of all subsequent Enlightenment thought, and all modern institutions.

The Republican broadside against Reason was on display in the first days of the Trump administration when Trump asserted that his inauguration crowd size was the largest in history. Presented with facts to the contrary, in photographic evidence, his assistant, Kellyanne Conway, proclaimed the existence of “alternative facts.” It’s been downhill since.

Republican discourse is a never-ending torrent of lies, idiocies, and absurdities—the very antithesis of Reason. The Muslim invasion. The caravan bringing murderers, rapists, drugs, and disease. Democrats eating babies. A satanic cult of pedophiles running the “Deep State.” A pandemic that would “disappear, like a miracle.” The greatest economy in the history of the world. Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head being canceled. Biden’s hamburger ban. A rigged election. Massive voter fraud. Terrorists who were really just tourists handing out hugs and kisses. It never ends.

The Republican assault on Reason is an attack not just on truth itself, but on our very capacity to think at all. With their base, Republicans address not the neo-cortex—the thinking part of the brain—but the amygdala—the lizard-brain seat of fight-or-flight. The amygdala subordinates logic, facts, reason, and deliberation to deceit, conspiracy, hysteria, and fear.

[Seabass]

Republican governor Ron DeFascist attacks free speech. I'm sure Cunt will be very upset about this, since he loves free speech.

Florida governor signs law to block ‘deplatforming’ of Florida politicians

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill Monday that bars social media companies like Twitter and Facebook from “knowingly” deplatforming politicians.

The bill, SB 7072, was proposed in February, weeks after former President Donald Trump was banned from Facebook and Twitter after the deadly right-wing riot at the US Capitol. The law bars social media platforms from banning Floridian political candidates and authorizes the Florida Election Commission to impose fines if these candidates were to be deplatformed. The fines range from $250,000 per day for statewide office candidates and $25,000 per day for non-statewide offices.

“This will lead to more speech, not less speech,” DeSantis said during a press conference at the Florida International University in Miami Monday. “Because speech that’s inconvenient to the narrative will be protected.”

Many are already skeptical about the new law’s legality, with the tech-friendly Chamber of Progress calling it “clearly unconstitutional.” As a state law, the measure could be overturned if courts find it conflicts with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which broadly immunizes platforms from liability for good-faith moderation activity. It could also be subject to a constitutional challenge under the First Amendment, which has been interpreted to broadly prevent government interference to corporate speech.

But regardless of its legal status, the measure will help establish DeSantis’ political bona-fides among the anti-tech wing of the Republican Party. For years, Republicans have pressured platforms like Facebook over their content moderation policies, accusing the companies of being biased against conservative speech online. DeSantis’ bill is one of the first major victories for populist Republicans in opposition to the power of Big Tech.

Carl Szabo, the vice president and general counsel for NetChoice, a trade group representing large tech companies like Facebook and Amazon, argued that the law could be found to be unconstitutional. “The First Amendment prohibits the government from compelling or controlling speech on private websites,” said Szabo. “If this law could somehow be enforced, it would allow lawful but awful user posts including pornography, violence, and hate speech that will make it harder for families to safely navigate online.”

The law includes a measure, added earlier this month, exempting any company that owns a large theme park or entertainment venue. At the time, Republican state Rep. Blaise Ingoglia said that the exemption was put in place to protect the Disney Plus streaming service. Florida’s economy benefits greatly from The Disney World parks in Orlando which provide significant tax revenue for the state.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/24/2245 ... latforming

[Seabass]

Republicans only hate cancel culture when it's someone else doing the canceling.

Why Conservatives Want to Cancel the 1619 Project
Objections to the appointment of Nikole Hannah-Jones to an academic chair are the latest instance of conservatives using the state to suppress ideas they consider dangerous.


Nikole Hannah-Jones is an award-winning Black journalist. She is also one of the developers of the 1619 Project, a journalistic examination of slavery’s role in shaping the American present. Last year, that work won her a Pulitzer Prize. Now it appears to have cost her a tenured chair at the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism.

The news outlet NC Policy Watch reported on Monday that the university’s dean, chancellor, and faculty had backed Hannah-Jones’s appointment to the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism, a tenured professorship, after a “rigorous tenure process at UNC.” But in an extraordinary move, the board of trustees declined to act on that recommendation. Hannah-Jones was instead offered a five-year, nontenured appointment following public and private pressure from conservatives. Notably, other Knight Chairs at the journalism school have been tenured on its professional track, which acknowledges “significant professional experience” rather than traditional academic scholarship. Hannah-Jones’s Pulitzer and MacArthur genius grant surely qualify.

One anonymous trustee told NC Policy Watch that “the political environment made granting Hannah-Jones tenure difficult, if not impossible.” A statement from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education noted that “if it is accurate that this refusal was the result of viewpoint discrimination against Hannah-Jones, particularly based on political opposition to her appointment, this decision has disturbing implications for academic freedom.”

If you’ve taken recent debates about free speech and censorship at face value, you might find Hannah-Jones’s denial of tenure deeply confusing. For the past five years, conservatives have been howling about the alleged censoriousness of the American left, in particular on college campuses. But the denial of tenure to Hannah-Jones shows that the real conflict is over how American society understands its present inequalities.

The prevailing conservative view is that America’s racial and economic inequalities are driven by differences in effort and ability. The work of Hannah-Jones and others suggests instead that present-day inequalities have been shaped by deliberate political and policy choices. What appears to be an argument about reexamining history is also an argument about ideology—a defense of the legitimacy of the existing social order against an account of its historical origins that suggests different policy choices could produce a more equitable society.

The 1619 Project is a particularly powerful part—but not the cause—of a Black Lives Matter–inspired reevaluation of American history that began in the waning years of the Obama administration. Many Americans were struggling to understand how a nation that had elected a Black president could retain deep racial disparities not only in the rate of poverty, access to education, and health care, but also in matters of criminal justice and political power. The election of Donald Trump, a president who understood American citizenship in religious and ethnonationalist terms, accelerated that process of reevaluation.

Like all the works this period of reevaluation has produced, the 1619 Project has its flaws—although fewer than its most fanatical critics would admit. But the details of its factual narrative were not what conservatives found most objectionable. Rather, they took issue with the ideological implications of its central conceit: that America’s true founding moment was the arrival of African slaves on America’s shores.

Hannah-Jones’s conservative detractors cast this claim as an argument that America is a fundamentally and irredeemably racist country—indeed, as NC Policy Watch notes, a columnist at the right-wing James G. Martin Center complained that the 1619 Project “seeks to reframe American history as fundamentally racist.” A different columnist at the same organization fumed that “young people—the white ones, at least—are even taught to hate themselves for the unforgivable sins of their ancestors.” The idea that ugly aspects of American history should not be taught, for fear that students—white students in particular—might draw unfavorable conclusions about America, is simply an argument against teaching history at all.

In truth, the animating premise of the 1619 Project is more threatening to the right—the idea that America can indeed be redeemed, by rectifying racial imbalances created by government policy.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... ct/618952/

[Seabass]

Some of this essay edges into hyperbole, but the phenomena it describes are real. The Republican Party has been retreating from reason since at least the Reagan era, and with Trump and Trumpist shitbirds like Greene and Gaetz it has stepped into different territory.

'The Republican Party and the End of Enlightenment'

The most egregious of Republican assaults on the modern world is its rejection of Reason. Reason is the way we know what we know. It is not through revelations from God, or the pronouncements of priests or monarchs as had been the case before the Enlightenment.

Reason as a process for discovering Truth started in the Scientific Revolution around 1550. It was so powerful a way of knowing the physical world, the philosophers of the Enlightenment adopted it for knowing—and improving—the social world. It became the foundation of all subsequent Enlightenment thought, and all modern institutions.

The Republican broadside against Reason was on display in the first days of the Trump administration when Trump asserted that his inauguration crowd size was the largest in history. Presented with facts to the contrary, in photographic evidence, his assistant, Kellyanne Conway, proclaimed the existence of “alternative facts.” It’s been downhill since.

Republican discourse is a never-ending torrent of lies, idiocies, and absurdities—the very antithesis of Reason. The Muslim invasion. The caravan bringing murderers, rapists, drugs, and disease. Democrats eating babies. A satanic cult of pedophiles running the “Deep State.” A pandemic that would “disappear, like a miracle.” The greatest economy in the history of the world. Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head being canceled. Biden’s hamburger ban. A rigged election. Massive voter fraud. Terrorists who were really just tourists handing out hugs and kisses. It never ends.

The Republican assault on Reason is an attack not just on truth itself, but on our very capacity to think at all. With their base, Republicans address not the neo-cortex—the thinking part of the brain—but the amygdala—the lizard-brain seat of fight-or-flight. The amygdala subordinates logic, facts, reason, and deliberation to deceit, conspiracy, hysteria, and fear.

No hyperbole. They're jus that awful...

[Tero]

Feeding the poor slows recovery!

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — Gov. Pete Ricketts is urging Nebraska lawmakers to uphold his veto of a bill that would let more residents collect food-assistance benefits, arguing that it would slow the state’s recovery from the pandemic.

The Republican governor says in his veto letter that the measure would create a disincentive for recipients to seek better-paying jobs at a time when many businesses are desperate for workers.

The veto issued Monday drew swift condemnation from advocates for the poor, who argue that many recipients are working families with children who are still struggling because of the pandemic. They also point out that the expansion would be paid with existing money and have no impact on the state budget.

Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

[JimC]

They're all poor because they're lazy, shiftless and often non-white!

[Tero]

State senate, including some Republicans overrode gov'nor.
https://omaha.com/news/state-and-region ... the-latest

He then cut the state senators' daily allowance. Some of them drive 60 miles or more to work. On busy days they stay here overnight. Their salary is less than 20 000. They only work 6 months. Some are farmers ranchers.

[Tero]

No excitement in GOP and no new candidates for 2022

Democrats, meanwhile, are excited about two Black women candidates (or almost candidates) in two states they're trying to flip that fall a bit lower down the list. Cheri Beasley, the former North Carolina Supreme Court chief justice, announced her candidacy for Senate last month, while Rep. Val Demings is planning a bid in Florida. Since Harris resigned from her seat to become vice president, there are no Black women in the Senate.
Across all these races, there's still time for new candidates to jump in and presumed candidates to back out, which is why these rankings will be updated many times over the next 18 months.

List of 10 at end
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/27/politics ... index.html