Republicans: continued

[Tero]

They have numbers! % million dollars! 17 phone calls!

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, along with Grassley, subpoenaed the FBI for access to the FD-1023 form in May, and House members were finally able to view the document behind closed doors last week.

NBC News reported on June 2, citing a senior law enforcement source, that the FBI and a U.S. attorney appointed by former President Donald Trump had reviewed the allegations against the Bidens in 2020, but had found the claims to be unsubstantiated.

Grassley said while speaking to the Senate that the FD-1023 document he had read showed "the foreign national who allegedly bribed Joe and Hunter Biden allegedly has audio recordings of his conversations with them—17 such recordings."

https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-tape ... ey-1806241

[Tero]

Biden allows bare breasts in White House. Disappointingly he did not sniff them. Republicans outraged.

Montoya, a TikTok influencer, originally posted the video from Saturday's event. It shows Montoya and another unnamed transgender activist, a biological female, baring their breasts on the South Lawn with the White House in view behind them.

Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz told Fox News Digital, "Joe Biden claimed he would ‘restore honor and decency to the White House.’"

"He’s failing miserably," Cruz said. "It used to be appropriate to wear a suit and tie to the White House, but now apparently you don’t even have to wear a shirt."

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/republ ... isgraceful

video
https://nypost.com/2023/06/13/rose-mont ... ing-biden/

[Sean Hayden]

It's all part of the programming. Honestly, I worry that paying attention and repeating the script helps them.

[Brian Peacock]

That's just what the algorithm wants you to think.

[Sean Hayden]

[JimC]

When did they start referring to Republican controlled states as "Red States"? I mean, back in the cold war days, the phrase "better dead than red" was on every conservatives lips...

[L'Emmerdeur]

In the US in the 20th century, electoral maps in various media (most prominently TV) weren't set in stone regarding color. Depending on the media outlet and the year, Republicans and Democrats might be red and blue or blue and red. The 2000 election cemented red=Republican states blue=Democratic states as the paradigm. Bush II was anointed by the Supreme Court after an evenly matched election that came down to a close vote in Florida (an ongoing recount halted by the Supreme Court). The election was discussed ad nauseum well after the day of the vote, and I think it (including the "red state/blue state" pattern) stuck in people's memory because of the drama.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Heh, found a much more detailed history on the red-state/blue-state thing, if any are interested in that. Turns out the first version was an echo of the UK where blue has meant Conservative and red, Labour, for yonks.*

'When Republicans Were Blue and Democrats Were Red'

Television’s first dynamic, color-coded presidential map, standing two stories high in the studio best known as the home to “Saturday Night Live,” was melting.

It was early October, 1976, the month before the map was to debut—live—on election night. At the urging of anchor John Chancellor, NBC had constructed the behemoth map to illustrate, in vivid blue and red, which states supported Republican incumbent Gerald Ford and which backed Democratic challenger Jimmy Carter.

The test run didn’t go well. Although the map was buttressed by a sturdy wood frame, the front of each state was plastic.

“There were thousands of bulbs,” recalled Roy Wetzel, then the newly minted general manager of NBC’s election unit. “The thing started to melt when we turned all the lights on. We then had to bring in gigantic interior air conditioning and fans to put behind the thing to cool it.”

That solved the problem. And when election results flowed in Tuesday night, Nov. 2, Studio 8-H at 30 Rockefeller Center lit up. Light bulbs on each state changed from undecided white to Republican blue and Democratic red. NBC declared Carter the winner at 3:30 a.m. EST, when Mississippi turned red.

That’s right: In the beginning, blue was red and red was blue and they changed back and forth from election to election and network to network in what appears, in hindsight, to be a flight of whimsy.

...

* I went in search of the origin of the colours for parties in Britain, and found the 'Political Colour' Wiki and The Polling by Hogarth, showing blue for Tory and buff for Whig in 1754. Didn't actually answer the question, but shows it goes back to at least the 18th century.

[JimC]

The people's flag is deepest red,
It shrouded oft our martyred dead,
And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold,
Their hearts' blood dyed its ev'ry fold.

Then raise the scarlet standard high.
Within its shade we'll live and die,
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer,
We'll keep the red flag flying here.

Look 'round, the Frenchman loves its blaze,
The sturdy German chants its praise,
In Moscow's vaults its hymns are sung
Chicago swells the surging throng.

Then raise the scarlet standard high.
Within its shade we'll live and die,
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer,
We'll keep the red flag flying here.

It waved above our infant might,
When all ahead seemed dark as night;
It witnessed many a deed and vow,
We must not change its colour now.

Then raise the scarlet standard high.
Within its shade we'll live and die,
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer,
We'll keep the red flag flying here.

It well recalls the triumphs past,
It gives the hope of peace at last;
The banner bright, the symbol plain,
Of human right and human gain.

Then raise the scarlet standard high.
Within its shade we'll live and die,
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer,
We'll keep the red flag flying here.

It suits today the weak and base,
Whose minds are fixed on pelf and place
To cringe before the rich man's frown,
And haul the sacred emblem down.

Then raise the scarlet standard high.
Within its shade we'll live and die,
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer,
We'll keep the red flag flying here.

With heads uncovered swear we all
To bear it onward till we fall;
Come dungeons dark or gallows grim,
This song shall be our parting hymn.

Then raise the scarlet standard high.
Within its shade we'll live and die,
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer,
We'll keep the red flag flying here.

[pErvinalia]

UK where blue has meant Conservative and red, Labour, for yonks.*

Same here. So much so that Labor male members wear red ties and conservative members wear blue ties.

[macdoc]

Canada is
Red for Liberals ( centre left )
Dark Blue for Conservatives ( used to be centre right but now farther right )
Orange for NDP ( left wing )
Green for the obvious
Light Blue for Quebec only Party Quebecois which only puts up Quebec representatives but has Federal Party status.

[rasetsu]

[L'Emmerdeur]

Thom Hartmann puts up a steady line of antifascist, anti-Republican pieces; pretty much all of them have some worthwhile points. I only post them here once in a while. This one examines the parallel between the Democratic-controlled South in the post-Reconstruction era and present day Republicans building a similar fiefdom largely based in the former Confederacy.

'Are We Seeing the Reemergence of the Old Confederacy, This Time as the GOP?'

Increasingly, the Republican Party is consolidating its power in a minority of states and turning them into little laboratories of neo-fascism. This is tough on people in those states — particularly people who are Black, queer, or female — but what is its larger impact on America?

“Power tends to corrupt,” Lord Acton famously noted, “and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

This is the great danger at the state level for both American political parties as the GOP sinks deeper and deeper into its mire of regionalism, violence, racism, homophobia, misogyny, gun deaths, pollution, and victimhood, led by corrupt politicians like Trump, DeSantis, Kemp, and Abbott.

...

Generally, Red states are committed to making it difficult for all but middle-aged white people to vote (and trying to block the vote of college students); Blue states welcome the participation of as broad a cross-section of society as possible.

Red states embrace guns, book and abortion bans, and pollution; Blue states are leading the way into pluralism, a clean energy future, and rebuilding their schools and infrastructure.

The contrast is startling: a child living in Mississippi is fully ten times more likely to be killed with a gun than a child living in Massachusetts.

Everybody in Oregon votes by mail and has for more than a quarter-century; Texas Republicans just made it extremely difficult for people in Houston to do the same, so they could force citizens in that very Blue city to take time off from work and stand in line for hours.

...

Following the Civil War, Democrats largely ceased to be a national party for two generations. The 1868 party platform still clung to the South’s embrace of racism and the oppression of Black people, stating bluntly:

In demanding these measures and reforms we arraign [accuse] the Radical [Republican] party for its disregard of right, and the unparalleled oppression that and tyranny which have marked its career. … Instead of restoring the Union, it has, so far as in its power, dissolved it, and subjected ten States, in times of profound peace, to military despotism and negro supremacy.

The Democrats — then openly the party most devoted to white supremacy — essentially said, “Screw the rest of the country; we’ve got our piece of it in the South and parts of New York and that’s all we care about.”

...

[T]he GOP is consolidating its power in Red states by asserting control over elections, purging tens of millions of voters off the rolls, destroying public schools, and arresting Black voters and parading them before cameras in shackles.

At the moment, their main advantage nationally is that the Party still has the support of the CEOs of the nation’s largest social media companies, oil companies, Vladimir Putin and MBS, bigoted white evangelicals, and most billionaires.

But will that be enough to avoid becoming a regional faction resembling the Confederacy? Increasingly, it looks like the answer is “no.” For six years the Republican Party has been telling America who it is, and broad swaths of the electorate are now believing them.

Today’s GOP must make a choice.

Will it continue down the fascist road that Trump, DeSantis, and Abbott have paved, devolving farther and farther into a corrupt, hateful, violent whites-only regional presence?

An amplification of the reemergence of the old Confederacy, this time as the GOP?

Or is it capable of change?

Now, we discover, it turns out I’m not the only one who’s noted this bizarre new dynamic. The rightwing billionaire Koch network just this morning released an ad against Donald Trump claiming that he’s “Joe Biden’s secret weapon.”

Apparently, they don’t just want regional power: they want to control the entire country. After all, it takes nationwide federal power to get looser pollution controls and more tax cuts.

But will the GOP repudiate fascism, misogyny, and racism and offer contrasting ideas to voters that aren’t just amped-up voter suppression, more guns, and the destruction of public education — with or without Donald Trump?

I’m not holding my breath.

[Brian Peacock]

UK where blue has meant Conservative and red, Labour, for yonks.*

Same here. So much so that Labor male members wear red ties and conservative members wear blue ties.

Members.

[Tero]

Juneteenth: the CRT inspired holiday that DeSantis will have to cancel
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juneteenth