U.S. Politics January 2023: Kevin McCarthy's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Life

"Basically" means "this is how I interpret what she said."

Does stuff like this regularly come out about male politicians? I can't think of any, other than Trump, and as KM said above, for his supporters that was a feature rather than a bug.

Franken

Franken had a reputation for being horrible to his staff? I honestly don't remember. He resigned over utter bullshit.

oh boy

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/rep-katie-porter-used-racist-language-ridiculed-people-for-reporting-sexual-harassment-ex-staffer-claims/ar-AA15OUIq

article containing quote PK shared (thanks, PK!)

it seems like she wasn't fired, however she was forced to work the remainder of her tenure remotely after being accused of not following office protocol and giving Porter COVID. she claims the office protocol was not to take a test immediately when feeling unwell (which isn't terribly unrealistic, a lot of company's/politician's policies had protocols that weren't very effective at stopping spread). sounds like a throw under the bus moment.

that's more than enough to give me pause, particularly the accusation of using racial slurs.

Seems odd that one of the accusations pivots on what was the office protocol regarding covid testing. You don't disseminate a protocol to your staff verbally, you have it written somewhere so it can be consulted when there are questions about it. Neither side is citing any documentation in that story. Ought to be an easy one to substantiate.

The story also leans heavily on a single person who is relies on characterizing what was said. We don't hear what racial slur was used, only that it was a racial slur. We don't hear the details of the alleged harrassment or the conversation between the person reporting it to Porter because the person telling us doesn't purport to be a witness to either event and even as hearsay it lacks details.

If this is going to be treated as real there needs to be more clarity. A lot more.

Franken

― sleeve, Tuesday, January 10, 2023 1:55 PM (twenty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol which one?

Mike Franken (sorry, ADMIRAL Mike Franken) tried to run for US senate in Iowa and some bizarre story dropped about how he may have grabbed and kissed a former staffer that he had dinner/drinks with. This was, coincidentally, the same week he sent out a mailer with an endorsement from Al Franken.

yeah, that's how these things work.

One person makes some accusations, not using a lot of specifics possibly so the stories can't be tracked back to any other staffer, possibly because it's just rumor. Then anonymous people (staffers?) back her up (again nothing specific or else they'd be identified)

I don't mean to dismiss complaints of young people (particularly in politics) but sometimes I have found their expectations of things are a little presumptive and they are sometimes surprised when entire institutions don't modify how they work to fit those expectations. So, in this case I'd like some specifics otherwise it's not really fair to the candidate, IMO. But also I think symbolically reading a 'the subtle art of not giving a fuck' is dumb, the way bringing popcorn is dumb.

My reaction to that Porter photo was “DANGER, WILL ROBINSON” and I now expect her to go full-Sinema within the next five years

yeah she's going to be an establishment politician, kinda what you have to do i guess, unless you're bernie. klobs probably not far off the mark.

Larry Kudlow indicates support for cutting military spending because "there's a lot of woke in that budget"

It's notable about "woke" has become a catch all for anything Republicans don't like pic.twitter.com/xL3PWWwKxC

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 9, 2023

F-35 scrapped for being too gay

woke gi bill comes with everything you see here

klobs making a staffer shave her legs is 100% i know that

allegedly

it's hard to be normal and be a politician because very few people can do the outsized personality thing it takes to get elected without being self-absorbed weirdos

there should be laws against being in politics for too long. also racism.

I don't mean to dismiss complaints of young people (particularly in politics) but sometimes I have found their expectations of things are a little presumptive and they are sometimes surprised when entire institutions don't modify how they work to fit those expectations. So, in this case I'd like some specifics otherwise it's not really fair to the candidate, IMO. But also I think symbolically reading a 'the subtle art of not giving a fuck' is dumb, the way bringing popcorn is dumb.

I don't read it that way at all, but ymmv

I've seen young people fail to register the full size of an institutional problem while being correct about the negative aspects of the specific bullshit they encounter.

yeah that's not what I meant, I was thinking more about it in terms of my experience as a manager of people in a workplace, and while I support empathetic workplaces etc, I occasionally run across people who expect work to also act as a place to do therapy for every single issue they have in their life, and people who claim trauma over getting negative performance reviews, etc.

which admittedly doesn't mean these claims aren't grounded in reality, I'd just like people to start being specific about shit because otherwise it's very easy to dismiss.

Okay, that I agree with— as you note, the specifics are important! Young people expecting work to be therapy or to be a place where they don’t have to live up to reasonable expectations is something I have also experienced as a manager, and mirrors behavior I’ve experienced as a teacher.

mirrors behavior I’ve experienced as a teacher.

*nods* Don't I know it.

Larry Kudlow indicates support for cutting military spending because "there's a lot of woke in that budget"

Military Woke = VA & educational benefits.

Of course these are the same people being captain save a captain on people who did not take the Covid vaccine yet at the same time did not give a s%1t about people that had health issues from burn piles, Ground Zero on 9/11 and/or whatever that stuff that they gave to many soldiers before the first gulf war that made them sick.

“He certainly hasn’t earned my trust,” Rep. Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, suggesting to @wolfblitzer there should be a House ethics investigation into George Santos

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) January 11, 2023

cute of him to even pretend like there will be ethics rules in this House

again, the guy on the left, eli crane, is only in congress because he sells bottle openers made up of 50mm shell casings and got to be on tv for it

Posted by Steve Bannon on GETTR pic.twitter.com/REvsnOvEz6

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) January 11, 2023

Been Larpin'

I wonder if these guys even remember George W Bush

I don’t

And that's just how George W Bush wants to be remembered.

That might be giving him too much credit

Blunderdome Pictures??

Seems odd that one of the accusations pivots on what was the office protocol regarding covid testing. You don't disseminate a protocol to your staff verbally, you have it written somewhere so it can be consulted when there are questions about it. Neither side is citing any documentation in that story. Ought to be an easy one to substantiate.

It's pretty fucking rich for someone who is clearly is not masking at work to be texting "You gave me Covid. Now my kids have no mom." to an employee.

i keep thinking Gettr is some sort of hookup app

gettr done

xpost also, by the time the staffer felt bad, they'd probably already been contagious for days. so the likelihood that following the alleged protocol would have stopped transmission is iffy. esp w/ non-masking Porter.

Nassau County (NY) GOP just called for Santos to resign. I don't think they care about the ethics/lies, I just assume they smell smoke on this guy and don't want to be near him when he explodes.

it was kind of sad to watch him grow and gain confidence during his first days at school, during the speaker votes. at first he sat in the back row by himself. by the end he was sitting with boebert, gaetz, and greene and it was clear that he was being embraced by the troll army

The Nassau County Republican Committee has exactly no power over a sitting member of congress, though.

And because the House GOP needs every vote it can get, it has no incentive to remove Santos.

How did he get the money to run? He won't say, and no one else knows. It's not necessarily illegal to suddenly have money, unless someone can (a) figure out where it came from and (b) demonstrate to someone with actual enforcement powers that it was illegally obtained. A general atmosphere of privacy protections makes this difficult unless a literal or figurative smoking gun is found.

So my prediction is that he serves out his two stupid years doing precisely nothing of use, and retires into obscurity. Perhaps he can go into landscaping.

Should he resign, a special election would happen, yes?

...which would presumably be won by a Democrat. Hence the entire GOP machinery will work to prevent that happening. There is no incentive for Santos to resign, nor is there an incentive for House leadership to force him to. Indeed, quite the contrary - the incentives all run the other direction.

Remember these are the people who gave you "I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles, I want control of the Senate!"

Ronny Jackson is fundraising off this pic.twitter.com/sBetEvJLbG

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 11, 2023

it's a miracle we found out about lead when we did sheesh

"the fatcats in washington are trying to take OUR LEAD"

There it is.

Alabama’s attorney general has said women who use pills to induce abortion could be prosecuted, citing a law first passed to protect children from meth lab fumes. His warning comes after the federal government’s recent move to ease access to medication abortion from retail pharmacies.

While Alabama has a near-total abortion ban that took effect after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, that legislation targets abortion providers and exempts the people receiving abortions from liability. However, Attorney General Steve Marshall’s office said women could still face consequences under the state’s “chemical endangerment of a child” statute.

“The Human Life Protection Act targets abortion providers, exempting women ‘upon whom an abortion is performed or attempted to be performed’ from liability under the law,” Marshall said in an emailed statement Wednesday. “It does not provide an across-the-board exemption from all criminal laws, including the chemical-endangerment law — which the Alabama Supreme Court has affirmed and reaffirmed protects unborn children.”

xp You'll pry my asbestos out of my cold, dead hands*

FREEDOM!

* = Literally

...which would presumably be won by a Democrat.

everyone keeps saying that. they have to run someone with a pulse, though.

robert zimmerman, the guy who got his ass kicked by santos in the election (embarrassing), must have been a supremely horrible candidate. i just learned that it was the first time that two openly LGBTQ candidates opposed each other in an election. zimmerman seemed to be an empty DNC suit kind of candidate. even when the race was very close, the RNC took a look at zimmerman and decided they could safely spend elsewhere and still win the district:

Late in the campaign, both parties realized the elections on Long Island would be close and could decide control of the House. A Democratic political action committee spent $3 million in the 3rd District race to support Zimmerman. On the Republican side, the Congressional Leadership Fund spent nothing, while at the same time committing $1.5 million to the neighboring 2nd and 4th district races, also ultimately won by Republican candidates.[40]