Where Are We Runnin’? - American Politics Thread, May 2022

How the hell can we expect to have any semblance of a functioning "democracy" in 10 years?

I no longer harbor this expectation.

Me neither. Beyond all the obvious points about the failure of our institutions, the simple fact is that all of these MAGA, QAnon people are not going away, no matter who wins the White House. It felt like there were a fair number of moderates/Dems who thought that if Trump lost the election, it would be like staking the head vampire in a film: his followers would snap out of their daze, rub their eyes and go back to being “normal” Republican. (As though Republicans haven’t been terrible for all of the 37 years I’ve been alive.) But I don’t see how this mass of cultists can really be deprogrammed to the degree that we won’t be an election away from disaster for the next however many years.

frogbs, you forgot the part where the elementary school shooting pushed the news that a white supremacist, whose online writings parroted mainstream right-wing talking points, murdered 10 people in an explicitly racist attack out of the news cycle and that virtually all of the 100% disingenuous GOP "solutions" to the Uvalde shooting wouldn't have worked in the Buffalo grocery store

In other news,

A federal district court, in a 2-1 decision Friday, implemented Ohio state Senate and House district maps for the 2022 election that have twice been declared unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders by the Ohio Supreme Court.

Thats some catch,

“We must presume state actors will work together to reach homegrown solutions,” the majority wrote. “And if they fail, then it is up to the voters to punish them if they so choose.”

Gerrymandered voters will fix this.

https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2022/05/27/federal-court-implements-statehouse-maps-twice-declared-unconstitutional-by-ohio-supreme-court/

Good morning!

“We must presume state actors will work together to reach homegrown solutions,” the majority wrote. “And if they fail, then it is up to the voters to punish them if they so choose.”

aaaaaaaaahahahahahahahahqhahahahahahahahahahaha

Not sure this is heckling. Seems instead to be a citizen of this country exercising his first amendment rights to an elected official and being manhandled by the elected official’s security while said official smirks and then returns to his dinner. https://t.co/vaA8Ruhux4

— kang (@jaycaspiankang) May 28, 2022

Ted Cruz shouldn't be able to go out in public without bags of piss and shit raining down upon him.

NEW this morning- Schumer and Pelosi have been urging Dems not to go after Manchin & Co when it comes to voting rights

Schumer told outside groups not to bully Manchin ahead of S1 vote

And Pelosi told steering members not to criticize individual senators

w/ @marianne_levine pic.twitter.com/DsyRzaayZQ

— Sarah Ferris (@sarahnferris) June 16, 2021

Schumer and Pelosi will always have more in common with a MAGA guy who owns 4 dealerships in the exurbs of Oklahoma City than they do with the majority of their voters

not sure why milo thinks a year-old tweet is worth re-posting as if it's some recent revelation. among other things, last june manchin was still seen as an undecided vote on the BBB budget bill that was seen as the lynchpin of Biden's agenda, crucial to the overall success of his administration.

The panicky look he gives his security

#BREAKING: Several hours after the #NRAconvention, Indivisible Houston board member @TheBenjaminHdz challenged Ted Cruz to support background checks & other reform measures during a dinner break.

See the full clip.#TedCruzHasBloodOnHisHands #TedCruzChildMassacre pic.twitter.com/LxvnaGzZJN

— Indivisible Houston (@indivisibleHOU) May 28, 2022

Vote https://t.co/wRhXRlhCmq

— Ben (@kleinstille) May 30, 2022

Biden, via @courtneyrozen, speaking about gun control negotiations.

“McConnell is a rational Republican. Cornyn is as well.”

— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) May 30, 2022

god, just retire biden, fuck

it's 1985!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

you know what i hate? all that artificial turf on baseball fields! come on, let's start playing on grass again

meanwhile mcconnell is laughing his ass off while he drinks blood he freeze-dried back before kent state

he doesn't even drink blood these days; he flatly presses his tongue against the prune-like texture for a few seconds, then he stares distantly for a while, with his tongue still out against the air

^^confusingly, that's biden doing that. mcconnell prefers the real blood and dreams of even more people dying unnecessarily on his watch

If you compare McConnell to some of the real Republican nutcases in Congress, he looks pretty rational. He's relentlessly evil, but he's a dispassionate and realistic judge of the best strategies to accomplish his evil ends while avoiding doing even a thimbleful of good. Whereas Marjorie Taylor-Greene just acts like she's missing parts of her brain.

mcconnell is the rare, and classic, Lawful Evil (as opposed to Greene's Chaotic Evil)

Nothing lawful about cocaine trafficking.

ofc, just because mitch is rational does not mean he won't happily dismember you and stuff the bloody pieces in a trunk, if he thought it would maintain his power. biden is just complimenting them to soften them up, which is a waste of time in their case, but it's part of joe's MO.

Connecticut Dem Senator Murphy is on all the tv network news shows giving a ridiculously optimistic take on bipartisan gun control negotiations--

Murphy said: “[T]here are more Republicans interested in talking about finding a path forward this time than I have ever seen since Sandy Hook.

"talking" ... I can't see him getting 10 Republican votes, or Manchin & Sinema

It's so dumb the GOP can't even get behind universal background checks/closing the 'gun show loophole.'

All the lobbying money should be behind it - it pushes people to buy new, it's a boon to gun store owners (if you want to sell a gun you take it to a shop and have them do the background check/transfer it, free $25-50 for the shop for doing one sheet of paperwork and a phone call). But they're absolutely shit scared of how their voters would respond.

than I have ever seen since Sandy Hook.

Yes! they want to talk! and talk and talk! until the heat dies down and then they'll do fuck all. So it will all be just like after Sandy Hook.

but that was just talk. this time, it's talk with a little bonus ingredient they like to call "can-do"

man and so much legislation and change happened in the wake of sandy hook too, things are finally looking up

the reality is that the Republican party has no future in power if any part of their current base becomes alienated. they cannot win squat unless they maintain the full allegiance of the gun nuts, white supremacists, dominionists, anti-abortion fanatics and neo-nazis, so the party is captive to the worst elements of the population. meaning the big business community is now captive to them, too.

time was when the Republican party confidently thought it could control its fringe, win elections, throw them a few bones and run the country as they pleased. now the fringe controls the party and no one has the courage to jump off the fascism train.

“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” — Benito Mussolini

What’s a Mussolini?

Maggie Smith's tea partner

Worth $500 on Jeopardy.

A hard read but an important one.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texas-leaders-children-uvalde-shooting/?fbclid=IwAR1JEcVZw_hF9ACRKjlp4iPGFdios6VwozJkqWMkUPELecFGk3U8_i22JYQ

sometimes i get caught in thinking about how we digest major news before it happens. you may have occasionally seen the first few run-on sentences of posts on the subject that usually end, several posts later, with me declaring that i'm going to get off the computer today and get to work on something more worthwhile.

just curious, though. when this SC roe v wade overturning comes out this summer (in late June, i expect?), does anyone think the decision's "rollout" and the public response to it will be any different than if it hadn't leaked in full months earlier? will the public response to the official decision be less passionate and raw because we've all been coping and adjusting and preparing for this new world for months now? will it be more passionate and raw because we all know what complete bullshit this is, that it goes against what most people in this country except for white christians want, and because there has been time to prepare a response to the decision that everyone knows is coming? or it will be about the same?

(please don't get hung up on adjectives like "passionate" and "raw", please don't let semantics get in the way of what i think i'm clearly trying to get at, please substitute other words or ideas so that the question makes any kind of sense)

I think it'll be plenty passionate and raw or whatever adjectives you prefer. Not least because in a lot of states — depending on how exactly the opinion is worded — it's going to set in motion the enactment of automatic abortion bans. So you'll have both the big-picture raw passion over the core issues, but also a whole lot of fervor in individual states as various kinds of restrictions are put in place and abortion clinics are forced to cease operating.

If anything, I think the leak has better primed everyone on all sides for all of those fights.

yep, that's how I see things over here

NEW: K-pop group BTS will join press sec. Karine Jean-Pierre at 2:30 p.m. ET for today's briefing, "where the Grammy-nominated musical group will deliver brief remarks," according to a White House official. https://t.co/ydQFimPtiX

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) May 31, 2022

Calling out the BTS Stan Army is honestly not a bad midterm strategy.

K-Corn Pop

The House January 6 Committee admitted temporary defeat, of a sort, to a panel of three Trump-appointed DC circuit court judges, who have temporarily blocked their efforts to obtain the Republican Party’s email-marketing data from the company Salesforce. Their intervention will make it impossible for the committee to obtain proprietary information—about how (and how well) the RNC used lies about the 2020 election to raise money and mobilize would-be insurrectionists—ahead of scheduled public hearings in June

https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/29/politics/january-6-committee-rnc-data/index.html

Someone else start the June thread

The Fall of Roe v Wade: US Politics, June 2022