Conservative Ideology 2024: NOTHING BUT LIES AND FEARMONGERING

[a fan]

MD’s favorite Republican weighs in on last night:



C92313D1-0393-4623-A41E-373EF54D9A42.jpeg

So much for the idea that Charter Schools and School Choice fixes everything, eh, Pete?

Huh. I thought you told us that that's all we need to do.

BTW.....what's your and Bloomberg's plan when teachers get sick of screaming parents who seem to think that teachers are supposed to fix all societies ills? Oh, and that parents get to dictate what's taught?

[cradleandshoot]

Worth the listen. This is from a real "Conservative," the type we haven't seen much of over the past five or six years:

https://twitter.com/chkbal/status/1494064827760840713

Typical judge......not listening to anyone but themselves.

just to name a couple....

Yup, and Adam Kinzinger...and Mitt Romney...and a bunch of folks who were run out of the GOP as RINO's. Jeff Flake...others sidelined, like John Kasich...

OMG, MD agreed with me....

The moon was full the other day, but it wasn't blue.

[Peter Brown]

MD’s favorite Republican weighs in on last night:

C92313D1-0393-4623-A41E-373EF54D9A42.jpeg

So much for the idea that Charter Schools and School Choice fixes everything, eh, Pete?

Huh. I thought you told us that that's all we need to do.

BTW.....what's your and Bloomberg's plan when teachers get sick of screaming parents who seem to think that teachers are supposed to fix all societies ills? Oh, and that parents get to dictate what's taught?

I’m not certain what you’re saying.

In any event, Bloomberg is a massive supporter of both charters and school choice. As am I.

I am not a fan of schools teaching CRT, teachers unions, and socialist lunatics teaching young kids. I don’t mind socialist lunatics teaching in college, it’s the elementary school crazies that we are seeing more and more of. I don’t feel that kid under 18 need to be indoctrinated into perverse sexual education, for example; 99% of Americans agree with me btw, before you start in on ‘fascism’.

[MDlaxfan76]

MD’s favorite Republican weighs in on last night:

C92313D1-0393-4623-A41E-373EF54D9A42.jpeg

So much for the idea that Charter Schools and School Choice fixes everything, eh, Pete?

Huh. I thought you told us that that's all we need to do.

BTW.....what's your and Bloomberg's plan when teachers get sick of screaming parents who seem to think that teachers are supposed to fix all societies ills? Oh, and that parents get to dictate what's taught?

I’m not certain what you’re saying.

In any event, Bloomberg is a massive supporter of both charters and school choice. As am I.

I am not a fan of schools teaching CRT, teachers unions, and socialist lunatics teaching young kids. I don’t mind socialist lunatics teaching in college, it’s the elementary school crazies that we are seeing more and more of. I don’t feel that kid under 18 need to be indoctrinated into perverse sexual education, for example; 99% of Americans agree with me btw, before you start in on ‘fascism’.

It's the constant exaggeration that's the issue. "perverse sexual education" has replaced simple "sex ed" as the hot button topic for folks get twisted up unknots about.

But, yes, sounds like the SF situation had a number of elements worth listening to. Bloomberg is not my "favorite" Republican, but I'd certainly include him the list of rational Republicans, or former Republicans, who've stood up to the extremes that have taken over the party.

[seacoaster]

Absolute shocker, right?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate- ... al-report/

Facing serious allegations about his ethics and conduct in office, Ryan Zinke, then secretary of Donald Trump’s Interior Department, told a government official in 2018 that he had done nothing improper. Negotiations over a land deal in his hometown of Whitefish, Mont., were proceeding without him. His involvement was minimal, he said; his meeting with the project’s developers at Interior headquarters was “purely social.”

But a report released Wednesday by the department’s internal watchdog caught Zinke in a lie. Email and text message exchanges show he communicated with the developers 64 times between August 2017 and July 2018 to discuss the project’s design, the use of his foundation’s land as a parking lot, and his interest in operating a brewery on the site.

“These communications, examples of which are set forth below, show that Secretary Zinke played an extensive, direct, and substantive role in representing the Foundation during negotiations with the 95 Karrow project developers,” Inspector General Mark Greenblatt’s office wrote.

Zinke “was not simply a passthrough for information,” the report said. “He personally acted for or represented the Foundation in connection with the negotiations.”

The report found that Zinke broke federal ethics rules repeatedly by improperly participating in real estate negotiations with the then-chairman of the energy giant Halliburton and other developers.

Zinke continued to represent his family’s foundation in the negotiations for nearly a year, investigators found, even after committing to federal officials that he would resign from the foundation and would not do any work on its behalf after he joined the Trump administration.

He met with the developers in his office at Interior headquarters in the summer of 2017, after which he gave them a personal tour of the Lincoln Memorial and dined with them at a German beer garden in the District, Biergarten Haus, according to records of his official schedule. Although investigators said they could not be sure what was discussed during this visit, they found it was not entirely social, as the developers presented Zinke with a plan for the parking lot during their trip to Washington.

Investigators also found that contrary to Zinke’s claims that his wife had taken over the project, the only evidence of communications between Lola Zinke and the developers was a single email from one developer to another, saying that Lola Zinke was rescinding the parking lot arrangement.

In a statement, the Zinke campaign called the investigation a “Biden Administration led report” that “published false information, and was shared with the press as a political hit job.”

“The report is totally subjective and [they] admitted they released it because their conclusions were too flimsy and biased for DOJ to even consider,” the campaign said.

Greenblatt was appointed by Trump.

Now a leading Republican candidate for a newly drawn congressional seat in Montana this fall, Zinke also misused his official position, the report concluded. Investigators found that he had directed some of his staff to set up a meeting with the developers and print documents related to the project. Federal officials are generally prohibited from assigning their employees tasks related to their private business."

[PizzaSnake]

MD’s favorite Republican weighs in on last night:

C92313D1-0393-4623-A41E-373EF54D9A42.jpeg

So much for the idea that Charter Schools and School Choice fixes everything, eh, Pete?

Huh. I thought you told us that that's all we need to do.

BTW.....what's your and Bloomberg's plan when teachers get sick of screaming parents who seem to think that teachers are supposed to fix all societies ills? Oh, and that parents get to dictate what's taught?

I’m not certain what you’re saying.

In any event, Bloomberg is a massive supporter of both charters and school choice. As am I.

I am not a fan of schools teaching CRT, teachers unions, and socialist lunatics teaching young kids. I don’t mind socialist lunatics teaching in college, it’s the elementary school crazies that we are seeing more and more of. I don’t feel that kid under 18 need to be indoctrinated into perverse sexual education, for example; 99% of Americans agree with me btw, before you start in on ‘fascism’.

“ perverse sexual education”

Like, say, RC Sunday school private tutoring with the ped, er, priest?

[PizzaSnake]

Absolute shocker, right?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate- ... al-report/

Facing serious allegations about his ethics and conduct in office, Ryan Zinke, then secretary of Donald Trump’s Interior Department, told a government official in 2018 that he had done nothing improper. Negotiations over a land deal in his hometown of Whitefish, Mont., were proceeding without him. His involvement was minimal, he said; his meeting with the project’s developers at Interior headquarters was “purely social.”

But a report released Wednesday by the department’s internal watchdog caught Zinke in a lie. Email and text message exchanges show he communicated with the developers 64 times between August 2017 and July 2018 to discuss the project’s design, the use of his foundation’s land as a parking lot, and his interest in operating a brewery on the site.

“These communications, examples of which are set forth below, show that Secretary Zinke played an extensive, direct, and substantive role in representing the Foundation during negotiations with the 95 Karrow project developers,” Inspector General Mark Greenblatt’s office wrote.

Zinke “was not simply a passthrough for information,” the report said. “He personally acted for or represented the Foundation in connection with the negotiations.”

The report found that Zinke broke federal ethics rules repeatedly by improperly participating in real estate negotiations with the then-chairman of the energy giant Halliburton and other developers.

Zinke continued to represent his family’s foundation in the negotiations for nearly a year, investigators found, even after committing to federal officials that he would resign from the foundation and would not do any work on its behalf after he joined the Trump administration.

He met with the developers in his office at Interior headquarters in the summer of 2017, after which he gave them a personal tour of the Lincoln Memorial and dined with them at a German beer garden in the District, Biergarten Haus, according to records of his official schedule. Although investigators said they could not be sure what was discussed during this visit, they found it was not entirely social, as the developers presented Zinke with a plan for the parking lot during their trip to Washington.

Investigators also found that contrary to Zinke’s claims that his wife had taken over the project, the only evidence of communications between Lola Zinke and the developers was a single email from one developer to another, saying that Lola Zinke was rescinding the parking lot arrangement.

In a statement, the Zinke campaign called the investigation a “Biden Administration led report” that “published false information, and was shared with the press as a political hit job.”

“The report is totally subjective and [they] admitted they released it because their conclusions were too flimsy and biased for DOJ to even consider,” the campaign said.

Greenblatt was appointed by Trump.

Now a leading Republican candidate for a newly drawn congressional seat in Montana this fall, Zinke also misused his official position, the report concluded. Investigators found that he had directed some of his staff to set up a meeting with the developers and print documents related to the project. Federal officials are generally prohibited from assigning their employees tasks related to their private business."

Crazy when he didn’t get “Man of the Year”…

[CU88]

DEPLORABLE



February 16, 2022
Heather Cox Richardson
Feb 17


Today, the Washington Post ran a story by Claire Parker explaining that most Canadian truckers oppose the so-called “Freedom Convoy” protests. Almost all Canadian truckers are vaccinated and resent the protesters, whose shutdown of international borders has “had a very significant negative impact upon our professional driving community,” according to Stephen Laskowski, the president of the Canadian Trucking Alliance.

Prominent leaders of the convoys, including conspiracy theorist James Bauder, are not truckers themselves. Instead, right-wing agitators appear to be the ones behind the Trump and Confederate flags at the protests. More than 55% of the donations to the Christian fundraising website GiveSendGo for the protesters came from the United States.

Truckers’ organizations say the protests undermine the real concerns of truck drivers—wage theft, bad roads, and a lack of bathrooms—and worry that the convoys will hurt the public image of truckers.

Parker’s Washington Post story showing the Freedom Convoys as the expression of a radical fringe was an important reality check to the breathless stories from the American right hailing the Freedom Convoys as a popular movement.

The story that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton allegedly spied on then-candidate Trump’s campaign in 2016 illustrates the importance of the sort of reality-based corrective the Washington Post published about the Canadian truckers.

The story at the root of the right’s accusations against Clinton is actually fascinating. After Russians hacked the servers of the Democratic National Committee in 2015 and 2016, cybersecurity experts started to look to see what else hackers might have hit. In July 2016, four of them noticed that Russia’s Kremlin-linked Alfa Bank appeared to be pinging a server registered to Trump Tower. To a lesser extent, it communicated with Spectrum Health in Michigan, an organization associated with the DeVos family. The servers were configured in such a way that they appeared to be shutting out other communications.

One of the security experts took the story to lawyer Michael Sussman, who took it to the general counsel at the Federal Bureau of Investigation in September 2016, alerting him that cybersecurity folks thought there might be secret communications between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank. Sussman worked for the same law firm that represented the Clinton presidential campaign.

In May 2019, Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, appointed John Durham, former U.S. attorney for Connecticut, as special counsel to investigate the origins of the FBI’s investigation into the relationship between the Trump campaign and Russia.

In September 2021, Durham indicted Sussman for lying to the FBI by saying he was not working for a client when he alerted them to the issue. Sussman denies he said he did not have a client, and identified himself as working for the cybersecurity expert. While Durham’s witness has contradicted himself, emails support Sussman’s account. For his part, Sussman responded by denying the charges and saying that Durham’s 27-page indictment contained “prejudicial—and false—allegations that are irrelevant to his Motion and to the charged offense, and are plainly intended to politicize this case, inflame media coverage, and taint the jury pool.”

In his indictment, Durham said the cybersecurity experts did not believe their own suggestion of connections between Alfa Bank and Trump Tower and were trying to hurt candidate Trump. They responded by accusing Durham of editing their emails misleadingly and stood behind their earlier conclusions.

The current furor is over a related issue. On Friday, in a court filing in the case against Sussman, Durham alleged that one of the cybersecurity experts, who was working for the White House as part of a cybersecurity contract, “exploited” his access there to find “derogatory information” about Trump. This charge stems from the fact that the researchers found odd data suggesting that a Russian-made smartphone, a YotaPhone, had communicated with the same networks—this we already knew—and that one of them told that information to the CIA in February 2017, about 20 days into the Trump administration. Durham did not indicate when he thought the experts had uncovered the issue—the timing suggests it was in 2016, before Trump took office—and the researcher’s lawyer has pointed out that the person had been hired to identify security breaches and threats.

The story is confusing, but it seems to show security experts who found anomalies and took them to the appropriate authorities (none of them has been charged with anything). The FBI dismissed the server issue, and it is not clear whether the phone issue was ever investigated. The launch of the FBI’s investigation of the ties between the Trump campaign and Russia had nothing to do with any of this, anyway. The investigation, called Crossfire Hurricane, began in July 2016 after George Papadopoulos, a member of the Trump campaign, told an informant that the campaign had dirt on Hillary Clinton. An investigation by the inspector general of the Justice Department concluded that the FBI investigation was not politically motivated.

The current story appears to be a nothing burger, and yet, the former president, right-wing media, and Trump loyalists are flooding the news with accusations that the Clinton campaign paid operatives to “infiltrate” servers at Trump Tower and the White House to create the Russia scandal. They are calling for multiple indictments.

​​Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) told the Fox News Channel on Sunday: “They were spying on the sitting president of the United States…. And it goes right to the Clinton campaign.” The former president claimed that “Robert” Durham—a name switch that might reflect his intense focus on Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who was in charge of the Russia investigation—had provided “indisputable evidence that my campaign and presidency were spied on by operatives paid by the Hillary Clinton Campaign in an effort to develop a completely fabricated connection to Russia.… In a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death.”

The right is complaining bitterly that the mainstream media has covered this story only briefly, insisting the lack of wall-to-wall coverage proves the media is biased against the right. But the exaggeration of this story seems a transparent attempt to revisit the 2016 attacks on Clinton in order to distract both from the revelations of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol and from the eye-popping news that Trump’s accountants have said the last ten years of his financial statements cannot be relied upon.

Controlling the narrative has always been a key factor in the right’s ability to turn out voters. But that ability just might be slipping.

Today, former judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit J. Michael Luttig, a Republican, said: “For the past six years, I have watched and listened in disgust that not one single leader of ours with the moral authority, the courage, and the will to stand up and say: ‘No, this is not who we are, this is not what America is, and it’s not what we want to be,’ has done so.”

Also today, a report by the Interior Department’s Inspector General Mark Greenblatt, who was appointed by former president Donald Trump, offered a window into how one Trump loyalist looked at our government as a way to further his own interests. The report concluded that Trump’s secretary of the interior, Ryan Zinke, broke federal ethics rules, lying to officials that he had “purely social” contact with developers in Whitefish, Montana, when in fact he communicated with the developers 64 times to talk about the project, including a parking lot on his own land and his interest in having a brewery on the property.

Zinke is now running for Congress. His campaign called the investigation a “Biden Administration led report” (the investigation began in 2018, under Trump) that “published false information, and was shared with the press as a political hit job.”

Spreading false stories depends on making sure the truth is inaccessible. Today Biden rejected Trump’s attempt to hide the White House visitor logs for January 6, 2021, from the January 6th committee on the grounds of executive privilege. Biden said that keeping them hidden “is not in the best interest of the United States.” Unless a court steps in, the National Archives and Records Administration will deliver them to the committee on March 3.

[SCLaxAttack]

DEPLORABLE



February 16, 2022
Heather Cox Richardson
Feb 17


Today, the Washington Post ran a story by Claire Parker explaining that most Canadian truckers oppose the so-called “Freedom Convoy” protests. Almost all Canadian truckers are vaccinated and resent the protesters, whose shutdown of international borders has “had a very significant negative impact upon our professional driving community,” according to Stephen Laskowski, the president of the Canadian Trucking Alliance.

Prominent leaders of the convoys, including conspiracy theorist James Bauder, are not truckers themselves. Instead, right-wing agitators appear to be the ones behind the Trump and Confederate flags at the protests. More than 55% of the donations to the Christian fundraising website GiveSendGo for the protesters came from the United States.

Truckers’ organizations say the protests undermine the real concerns of truck drivers—wage theft, bad roads, and a lack of bathrooms—and worry that the convoys will hurt the public image of truckers.

Parker’s Washington Post story showing the Freedom Convoys as the expression of a radical fringe was an important reality check to the breathless stories from the American right hailing the Freedom Convoys as a popular movement.

The story that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton allegedly spied on then-candidate Trump’s campaign in 2016 illustrates the importance of the sort of reality-based corrective the Washington Post published about the Canadian truckers.

The story at the root of the right’s accusations against Clinton is actually fascinating. After Russians hacked the servers of the Democratic National Committee in 2015 and 2016, cybersecurity experts started to look to see what else hackers might have hit. In July 2016, four of them noticed that Russia’s Kremlin-linked Alfa Bank appeared to be pinging a server registered to Trump Tower. To a lesser extent, it communicated with Spectrum Health in Michigan, an organization associated with the DeVos family. The servers were configured in such a way that they appeared to be shutting out other communications.

One of the security experts took the story to lawyer Michael Sussman, who took it to the general counsel at the Federal Bureau of Investigation in September 2016, alerting him that cybersecurity folks thought there might be secret communications between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank. Sussman worked for the same law firm that represented the Clinton presidential campaign.

In May 2019, Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, appointed John Durham, former U.S. attorney for Connecticut, as special counsel to investigate the origins of the FBI’s investigation into the relationship between the Trump campaign and Russia.

In September 2021, Durham indicted Sussman for lying to the FBI by saying he was not working for a client when he alerted them to the issue. Sussman denies he said he did not have a client, and identified himself as working for the cybersecurity expert. While Durham’s witness has contradicted himself, emails support Sussman’s account. For his part, Sussman responded by denying the charges and saying that Durham’s 27-page indictment contained “prejudicial—and false—allegations that are irrelevant to his Motion and to the charged offense, and are plainly intended to politicize this case, inflame media coverage, and taint the jury pool.”

In his indictment, Durham said the cybersecurity experts did not believe their own suggestion of connections between Alfa Bank and Trump Tower and were trying to hurt candidate Trump. They responded by accusing Durham of editing their emails misleadingly and stood behind their earlier conclusions.

The current furor is over a related issue. On Friday, in a court filing in the case against Sussman, Durham alleged that one of the cybersecurity experts, who was working for the White House as part of a cybersecurity contract, “exploited” his access there to find “derogatory information” about Trump. This charge stems from the fact that the researchers found odd data suggesting that a Russian-made smartphone, a YotaPhone, had communicated with the same networks—this we already knew—and that one of them told that information to the CIA in February 2017, about 20 days into the Trump administration. Durham did not indicate when he thought the experts had uncovered the issue—the timing suggests it was in 2016, before Trump took office—and the researcher’s lawyer has pointed out that the person had been hired to identify security breaches and threats.

The story is confusing, but it seems to show security experts who found anomalies and took them to the appropriate authorities (none of them has been charged with anything). The FBI dismissed the server issue, and it is not clear whether the phone issue was ever investigated. The launch of the FBI’s investigation of the ties between the Trump campaign and Russia had nothing to do with any of this, anyway. The investigation, called Crossfire Hurricane, began in July 2016 after George Papadopoulos, a member of the Trump campaign, told an informant that the campaign had dirt on Hillary Clinton. An investigation by the inspector general of the Justice Department concluded that the FBI investigation was not politically motivated.

The current story appears to be a nothing burger, and yet, the former president, right-wing media, and Trump loyalists are flooding the news with accusations that the Clinton campaign paid operatives to “infiltrate” servers at Trump Tower and the White House to create the Russia scandal. They are calling for multiple indictments.

​​Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) told the Fox News Channel on Sunday: “They were spying on the sitting president of the United States…. And it goes right to the Clinton campaign.” The former president claimed that “Robert” Durham—a name switch that might reflect his intense focus on Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who was in charge of the Russia investigation—had provided “indisputable evidence that my campaign and presidency were spied on by operatives paid by the Hillary Clinton Campaign in an effort to develop a completely fabricated connection to Russia.… In a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death.”

The right is complaining bitterly that the mainstream media has covered this story only briefly, insisting the lack of wall-to-wall coverage proves the media is biased against the right. But the exaggeration of this story seems a transparent attempt to revisit the 2016 attacks on Clinton in order to distract both from the revelations of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol and from the eye-popping news that Trump’s accountants have said the last ten years of his financial statements cannot be relied upon.

Controlling the narrative has always been a key factor in the right’s ability to turn out voters. But that ability just might be slipping.

Today, former judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit J. Michael Luttig, a Republican, said: “For the past six years, I have watched and listened in disgust that not one single leader of ours with the moral authority, the courage, and the will to stand up and say: ‘No, this is not who we are, this is not what America is, and it’s not what we want to be,’ has done so.”

Also today, a report by the Interior Department’s Inspector General Mark Greenblatt, who was appointed by former president Donald Trump, offered a window into how one Trump loyalist looked at our government as a way to further his own interests. The report concluded that Trump’s secretary of the interior, Ryan Zinke, broke federal ethics rules, lying to officials that he had “purely social” contact with developers in Whitefish, Montana, when in fact he communicated with the developers 64 times to talk about the project, including a parking lot on his own land and his interest in having a brewery on the property.

Zinke is now running for Congress. His campaign called the investigation a “Biden Administration led report” (the investigation began in 2018, under Trump) that “published false information, and was shared with the press as a political hit job.”

Spreading false stories depends on making sure the truth is inaccessible. Today Biden rejected Trump’s attempt to hide the White House visitor logs for January 6, 2021, from the January 6th committee on the grounds of executive privilege. Biden said that keeping them hidden “is not in the best interest of the United States.” Unless a court steps in, the National Archives and Records Administration will deliver them to the committee on March 3.

January 6 White House visitor logs. This is going to be SOOOOO much fun.

Who's got the popcorn?

[Peter Brown]

Is that post from Heather’s personal political diary? Was she hacked?

The best way to read that, if you’re a Democrat, is to take some shrooms and sit back….you’ll be taken to some faraway fantasy land where Trump was never POTUS but Kween Hilarious Clinton was instead.

Heather’s posts are like an hysterical tweet-thread from a broken lefty lunatic like Seth Abramson or Kurt Eichenwald, covering every conspiracy theory known to man, finding hidden Easter eggs in every nook, dutifully explaining that Oz is in control, that 1984 was a bible not a novel.

My brain hurts,

[MDlaxfan76]

Assuming they actually logged everyone in and didn't flush that page down the toilet...

[SCLaxAttack]

Assuming they actually logged everyone in and didn't flush that page down the toilet...

One would hope the Secret Service gatehouse is more exacting in their record keeping than the secretary outside the door to the Oval Office.

[MDlaxfan76]

Assuming they actually logged everyone in and didn't flush that page down the toilet...

One would hope the Secret Service gatehouse is more exacting in their record keeping than the secretary outside the door to the Oval Office.

One would indeed hope.

[dislaxxic]

..

[seacoaster]

More shameful stupidity from JD Vance:

https://twitter.com/JDVance1/status/1495124288864665600

[dislaxxic]

Christian nationalism is rooted in stupid tough-guy misogyny: What would Jesus say?

In truth, Christian nationalism is based not in the Bible or the teachings of Jesus Christ, but on the idea of the traditional American family. As roles for women have changed, as divorce becomes more common, as same-sex marriage gains a firmer footing, and now with the movement for transgender rights and visibility becoming more public, the panic of the Christian nationalists becomes ever more desperate. This is where all that rage among evangelicals is coming from. Understand, most people are motivated politically based on how they perceive policy decisions affecting their day-to-day life. Nothing affects our lives more than what is happening to our families. When things fall apart at home, it can feel helpful — even if it's not healthy — to blame someone or something besides ourselves. For myself, I know that all my personal failures are mine alone. I can't blame MTV or Eminem or the LGBTQI population, the evangelical church, Trump, Biden, Obama, my mom, my dad or anyone else. The problem is in the mirror, as it is for everyone. Any effort to pass that blame along to others is quite human, and quite wrong.

My final point on Christian nationalism is around all the macho tough-guy stuff that seems to be on the lips of every right-wing leader. Being "tough" seems to be the only thing conservative commentators and evangelical leaders care about. Trump is supposedly the epitome of that and his little posse loves him for it. I won't pretend to understand it. After I graduated middle school, being tough just didn't seem that important. But for people like Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Jerry Falwell Jr. (before his fall) and of course Trump himself, it's important to keep pretending that they are a bunch of tough guys, even though they also claim to stand with Jesus Christ, a humble, meek and homeless teacher.

..

[Peter Brown]

More shameful stupidity from JD Vance:

https://twitter.com/JDVance1/status/1495124288864665600

It’s dumb of JD to engage attacks like this, because he has a point, and it needs to be made. And lost in the shuffle is the fact that two demented lunatics of the left, Malcolm Nance (a stolen valor guy) and Ron Filipkowski (a Florida guy who has readily admitted to being in and out of mental hospitals), began the idiocy, and McCaffery (no ones idea of a brain surgeon) jumped in with the first ad hominem attack.

Many ex-military do indeed benefit financially from war, or threats of war, and definitely from increased military spending. If you doubt that, you’re not living in reality.

The thing is, you don’t attack a guy like McCaffrey to make that point, at least not in this manner. You engage, and see if he will admit what you’re attempting to say. Maybe he will. But if not, I think you can gently let readers know that going to war is always the last answer, and perhaps our military budget does not need to be nearly a trillion dollars per annum.

Oddly, the left has forgotten all that post-Trump.

[cradleandshoot]

MD’s favorite Republican weighs in on last night:

C92313D1-0393-4623-A41E-373EF54D9A42.jpeg

So much for the idea that Charter Schools and School Choice fixes everything, eh, Pete?

Huh. I thought you told us that that's all we need to do.

BTW.....what's your and Bloomberg's plan when teachers get sick of screaming parents who seem to think that teachers are supposed to fix all societies ills? Oh, and that parents get to dictate what's taught?

I’m not certain what you’re saying.

In any event, Bloomberg is a massive supporter of both charters and school choice. As am I.

I am not a fan of schools teaching CRT, teachers unions, and socialist lunatics teaching young kids. I don’t mind socialist lunatics teaching in college, it’s the elementary school crazies that we are seeing more and more of. I don’t feel that kid under 18 need to be indoctrinated into perverse sexual education, for example; 99% of Americans agree with me btw, before you start in on ‘fascism’.

“ perverse sexual education”

Like, say, RC Sunday school private tutoring with the ped, er, priest?

I wonder there is any history of Rabbi's being pedophiles? Maybe that is just a Catholic priest thing?? I know a few of our members on this forum are of the Jewish faith... what say you??

[jhu72]

... another republiCON moron running for congress.

[a fan]

... another republiCON moron running for congress.

I have no doubt that a college would try and deconstruct what a guy like that taught them. No question.

How long before guys like Pete and DeSantis get rid of public education?