Republicans: continued

[Hermit]

Not just that, the pic is Einstein. This is Twain:

That's Albert Schweitzer, you fool!

[Scot Dutchy]

That's Ned. Anyone can see that.

[Brian Peacock]

It's about time that good Christianly white folks had protection from discrimination.

Make the fags sit at the back of the bus I say!

[pErvinalia]

Not just that, the pic is Einstein. This is Twain:

[Tero]

Then it's the perfect meme! Absolutely no facts required when Trump or Republicans are involved.

[Cunt]

Not just that, the pic is Einstein. This is Twain:

This is pretty silly of you. This guy is clearly Kevin Spacey dressed (for a stage play) as Rodger Young.

[Joe]

I thought that was Hal Holbrook playing Sam Elliott, but I can't keep all these Hollywood types straight.

[Cunt]

I just watched the Golden Compass last night, because I fucking LOVE that ridiculous bear character.

He punches the other bears bottom JAW off, breaks his neck and says 'Yes, that is all.'

Made me want to go punch a polar bear! YEEEEAAAHHHHH!

Next up is The Big Lebowski. I think the guy in the hat was in the Big Lebowski...dies during a fight in a parking lot, over a marmot, if I recall correctly.

[Seabass]

GOP blocks election security bills after Mueller testimony
https://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/ ... -testimony

[Tero]

...all you had to do was attend TPUSA's Student Action Summit, underway this week in Washington. There, some 1,500 young people, most of them high schoolers, celebrated all things Donald. Red MAGA hats were everywhere; many kids wore T-shirts saying "they hate us cuz they ain't us." One young woman saluted a previous GOP hero by wearing a vintage Reagan-Bush 1980 campaign T-shirt.

But this party, now, is not the party of Reagan. That's long gone. As the rapturous welcome they gave Trump at his nearly two-hour speech on Tuesday shows, these kids are not young Reaganites, they are Trumpkins through and through. They are not Young Americans for Freedom, the conservative youth group that has existed for decades (and which Reagan loved); these are the kids of Turning Point USA. And in Kirk's view, echoing Trump yesterday, they are the future. ''I think [Trump] has changed the party forever, and for the better," he says.
Newsweek

[Seabass]

Ruthless Trump Voters Rationalize Border Horror Over Breakfast

[Joe]

Fake news!

‘Putin’s Mitch’ billboard grabs attention on Interstate 65

HART COUNTY, Ky.- A new billboard along I-65 in Hart County is raising some eyebrows.

The sign reads, “Putin’s Mitch” and features a photo of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Mad Dog Political Action Committee paid for the sign and another anti-McConnell sign elsewhere.

“That’s what our campaign is about, it’s about putting up billboards that bring awareness to some of these issues directly to the people of Kentucky,” said Claude Taylor, chairman of Mad Dog PAC.

Mad Dog is trying to raise attention to a company owned-in-part by sanctioned Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, who is investing millions of dollars into Braidy Industries, an aluminum manufacturer in Ashland, Ky. Deripaska has close ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Last year, McConnell supported the idea of lifting those sanctions, which President Trump did this past January.

[Seabass]

Mitch McConnell is a Russian asset
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... story.html

Mitch McConnell is a Russian asset.

This doesn’t mean he’s a spy, but neither is it a flip accusation. Russia attacked our country in 2016. It is attacking us today. Its attacks will intensify in 2020. Yet each time we try to raise our defenses to repel the attack, McConnell, the Senate majority leader, blocks us from defending ourselves.

Let’s call this what it is: unpatriotic. The Kentucky Republican is, arguably more than any other American, doing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bidding.

Robert Mueller sat before Congress this week warning that the Russia threat “deserves the attention of every American.” He said “the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in our election is among the most serious” challenges to American democracy he has ever seen. “They are doing it as we sit here, and they expect to do it during the next campaign,” he warned, adding that “much more needs to be done in order to protect against these intrusions, not just by the Russians but others as well.”

Not three hours after Mueller finished testifying, Mark Warner (D-Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, went to the Senate floor to request unanimous consent to pass legislation requiring presidential campaigns to report to the FBI any offers of assistance from agents of foreign governments.

Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.) was there to represent her leader’s interests. “I object,” she said.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) attempted to move a bill that would require campaigns to report to the FBI contributions by foreign nationals.

“I object,” said Hyde-Smith.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) tried to force action on bipartisan legislation, written with Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and supported by Sens. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.), protecting lawmakers from foreign cyberattacks. “The majority leader, our colleague from Kentucky, must stop blocking this common-sense legislation and allow this body to better defend itself against foreign hackers,” he said.

“I object,” repeated Hyde-Smith.

The next day, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the minority leader, asked for the Senate to pass the Securing America’s Federal Elections Act, already passed by the House, that would direct $600 million in election assistance to states and require backup paper ballots.

McConnell himself responded this time, reading from a statement, his chin melting into his chest, his trademark thin smile on his lips. “It’s just a highly partisan bill from the same folks who spent two years hyping up a conspiracy theory about President Trump and Russia,” he said. “Therefore, I object.” McConnell also objected to another attempt by Blumenthal to pass his bill.

Pleaded Schumer: “I would suggest to my friend the majority leader: If he doesn’t like this bill, let’s put another bill on the floor and debate it.”

But McConnell has blocked all such attempts, including:

A bipartisan bill requiring Facebook, Google and other Internet companies to disclose purchasers of political ads, to identify foreign influence.

A bipartisan bill to ease cooperation between state election officials and federal intelligence agencies.

A bipartisan bill imposing sanctions on any entity that attacks a U.S. election.

A bipartisan bill with severe new sanctions on Russia for its cybercrimes.

McConnell has prevented them all from being considered — over and over again. This is the same McConnell who, in the summer of 2016, when briefed by the CIA along with other congressional leaders on Russia’s electoral attacks, questioned the validity of the intelligence and forced a watering down of a warning letter to state officials about the threat, omitting any mention of Russia.

continued: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... story.html

[Seabass]

Mueller made one thing clear: Republicans are a national security threat
https://www.salon.com/2019/07/26/muelle ... ty-threat/

The integrity of American elections was compromised long before Donald Trump’s shocking victory in 2016, but former special counsel Robert Mueller’s testimony before Congress on Wednesday made clear that one political party is actively subverting attempts to protect our democracy.

Hours after Mueller testified about foreign election interference before the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday afternoon, the Republican-controlled Senate moved to block four separate bills to defend the U.S. democratic process.

"Over the course of my career, I've seen a number of challenges to our democracy," Mueller said in his opening remarks. "The Russian government's effort to interfere in our election is among the most serious. As I said on May 29, this deserves the attention of every American."

Muller told the committee that the Russian effort “wasn’t a single attempt. They’re doing it as we sit here, and they expect to do it during the next campaign.”

He later told lawmakers that "much more needs to be done in order to protect against these intrusions — not just by the Russians, but others as well.” Researchers have already reported suspected Iranian disinformation campaigns on most major social media platforms this year.

What Mueller said, coupled with his report — which found that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 election in “sweeping and systematic fashion” — is breathtaking. Russia's disinformation campaign in 2016 spent more than $1 million a month, as Mueller reported in an indictment last year. When given an opportunity to question Mueller, however, some Republicans on the Intelligence Committee actually challenged him on his findings, complaining that he was baselessly defaming the Kremlin.

Even beyond their evident lack of interest in preventing election interference from happening again, Republicans seem to be defending it. This is no surprise when you recall that President Trump said as recently as last month that he'd be fine with accepting damaging information on an opponent from a foreign government.

"I think you might want to listen," Trump said in an interview with ABC News. "There isn't anything wrong with listening." The next presidential election is less than 16 months away.

“The Russians are absolutely intent on trying to interfere with our elections,” FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.

The next day, only hours after Mueller testified to the same effect, Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi, a Republican, blocked two election-security bills and a measure regarding cybersecurity for Senate staff.

Democrats had hoped to pass a pair of bills requiring campaigns to alert the FBI and the Federal Election Commission if they received offers of assistance from abroad. Another bill would allow the sergeant-at-arms to offer voluntary assistance to help secure the personal devices and accounts of senators and their staff.

Hyde-Smith blocked all the bills without offering any explanation for her action or stating whether she made the motion by herself or on behalf of her party. Her move is generally in keeping with Republican arguments that Congress has already responded to election security issues, which primarily fall on state officials. Under Senate rules, any one senator can ask for consent to pass a bill but any individual senator is able to object.

continued: https://www.salon.com/2019/07/26/muelle ... ty-threat/

[L'Emmerdeur]

It's so easy for a feckless arse of a US Senator to regurgitate ready-made distortions from the right wing media world, and such a bother to fact-check.

'How Marco Rubio ended up broadcasting a lie about Ilhan Omar'

If a recent viral video is to be believed, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) wants to turn the FBI loose on white guys.

“Our country should be more fearful of white men,” she says in the footage, which currently has more than 2.7 million views on Twitter alone due to a viral tweet from a right-leaning reporter. “We should be profiling, monitoring, and creating policies to fight the radicalization of white men.”

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) has already condemned it: “I am sure the media will now hound every Democrat to denounce this statement as racist. Right?” he asked rhetorically.

The problem is the quotes are taken out of context. The full interview clip — from a February 2018 video with Al Jazeera — makes clear that Omar is not calling for FBI surveillance of white men. She’s actually making a semi-sarcastic point about the way Muslims like her have been unfairly treated as terrorism risks by American politicians and law enforcement. It’s a legitimate point, albeit phrased in a particularly inartful and awkward fashion.

The lesson from all this is not that Omar is some kind of anti-white bigot, but that bad-faith distortions can quickly make their way into the US Senate and be used to smear a Congress member who is already being singled out for racist attacks by the president.

...

The original source for the misleading video is the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), a conservative evangelical outlet. In a CBN article by prominent journalist David Brody, Omar is quoted in a way that excises the context and transmutes her condemnation of Islamophobia into an attack on white men:

Moderator: “A lot of conservatives, in particular, would say the rise in Islamaphobia is a result not of hate but of fear. A legitimate fear they say of, ‘jihadist terrorism’ whether it’s Fort Hood or San Bernardino, or the recent truck attack in New York. What do you say to them?”

Omar: “I would say that our country should be more fearful of white men across our country because they are actually causing most of the deaths within this country.”

In another part of the same interview, Omar adds, “We should be profiling monitoring and creating policies to fight the radicalization of white men.”

This could be an honest mistake of the sort journalists inevitably make. Except that CBN also put out a video that makes the same edit, cutting out the context between “more fearful” and “we should be profiling” — which is less than a sentence — to make it look like she’s actually advocating profiling.

This edited video was then tweeted by Molly Prince, who was until recently a politics reporter at the right-wing news site the Daily Caller. Prince’s tweet flew around right-wing internet, with retweets from major figures like Glenn Beck, Dana Loesch, and Dave Rubin; currently, it has around 11,000 retweets. It’s also the source for Rubio’s allegation that Omar’s comments were racist...

What you see here, then, is the real-time anatomy of a smear.

A right-wing media outlet goes after a Democrat — and not just any Democrat, but a black Muslim woman who has been the target of relentless racist harassment by the president. The smear gets picked up on social media, where absent the full video context you can’t tell that it’s a distortion of her meaning. It then goes viral, where a sitting US senator finds it and broadcasts it to his followers — bringing what was originally a fringe smear into the mainstream.

This isn’t the first time this has happened. It’s not even the first time it’s happened to Omar. And as long as there are bad-faith actors in conservative media who are willing to lie and amplify lies, it won’t be the last.