Republicans: continued

[Tero]

On the plus side, when Trump gets convicted and is placed on parole, no ankle monitor is needed. The secret service will be with him at all times.

[Tero]

[Seabass]

https://www.prri.org/research/qanon-con ... cs-report/

[JimC]

I'm just glad the percentages aren't higher...

[L'Emmerdeur]

As Vonnegut would say, 'So it goes.'

'The Ugly Truth: Republicans Want More Poverty & Crime'

The Republican Party is running a huge scam right now, similar to the one they ran in 1992 when President George HW Bush was setting up phony cocaine busts across the street from the White House having achieved his position by running his infamous Willie Horton ad four years earlier.

Here’s the essential formula:

• Increase levels of inequality in the country to the point where poverty and homelessness are a crisis.
• Do this with huge, trillion-dollar tax cuts for rich people so they get massively richer, while gutting social-safety-net programs and supports for working class people like unions.
• Poverty and homelessness increase which produces an increase in crime, and that freaks out middle-class people — the majority of voters.
• Then build your political identity and campaign around being “tough on crime” while completely ignoring the fact that the poverty you helped create is largely responsible for much of that crime.
• Blame the poverty-driven crime, instead, on “welfare“ programs Democrats have put into place to try to soften the blow of the poverty caused by Republican policies.
• Get elected, create more poverty; rinse, wash and repeat.

This is not a new idea. Around 170 A.D. Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius said, “Poverty is the mother of crime,” although he was actually trying to reduce both in the wake of others who’d made poverty and thus crime worse.

And then there’s inequality, which it turns out is at least as consequential as poverty as a driver of criminal behavior.

Years of research done by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett of the Equality Trust in the UK found that as inequality goes up, so does crime — particularly violent crime.

As their research notes:

“Rates of violence are higher in more unequal societies. This finding holds up in many different contexts, we looked at via different methodologies and after controlling for other determinants of crime such as low income, unemployment, and teen birth rates.

“Small permanent decreases in inequality — such as reducing inequality from the level found in Spain to that in Canada – would reduce homicides by 20% and lead to a 23% long-term reduction in robberies.”

Inequality, it turns out, may be an even more effective driver of violent crime than poverty. And the United States today is the most unequal society in the developed world.

This week while taking a walk in Portland, my wife Louise was attacked by a homeless man, who threw a water bottle at her and chased her down the street. He was almost certainly mentally ill as well as poor; programs for the mentally ill were mostly nuked by Reagan and have never recovered.

And research from the Equality Trust shows that inequality is associated with mental illness; as societies become more unequal, mental illness increases. The data holds all over the world.

Nonetheless, the GOP continues to promote policies that increase inequality and thus increase violent crime and mental illness, while blaming it all on Democratic welfare programs.

...

When Democrats work to lift people out of poverty, it lifts the entire economy. As Republicans work to cut taxes on rich people and spending on poor people, it whacks the economy.

Investment strategist Sam Stovall pointed out, in a USA Today article by Doug Stanglin, that “every Republican president since Chester A. Arthur (1881-85) had a recession during his administration.”

Stanglin notes that Clinton “averaged 3.7% [economic growth] over eight years,” while, “Of the post-World War II presidents, only Truman, at 4.8%, Kennedy at 5.2% and Johnson at 5.1% scored higher average growth rates. By contrast, Reagan averaged 3.5%, Carter 3.3%, Nixon 3.1%, Bush I and Ford 2.2% and Bush II 1.65%…”

...

For [Republicans], it’s not inequality or even poverty that leads to crime, particularly violent crime: it’s “character.” And “character,” more often than not, is simply a stand-in reference for “racial minorities” or, at best, “poor people.”

They know it like a mantra because they’ve been saying it for years. Poverty is just fine. Don’t worry about it. It’s not causing crime; you can just look at those folks and see their criminality. As my right-wing colleague talk-show host Dennis Prager asserts, “It is not material poverty that causes violent crime, but poor character.”

...

Taking this out of the American political and social context altogether, a study published by the National Institute of Health (NIH) about the impact of poverty in China is instructive.

The study looked at two years of homicides across China and found that “poverty and low income levels” are “positively related to homicide rates.”

But don’t expect the Republicans to wake up any day soon. This is just science, after all. They will never, ever vote to raise taxes on the billionaires and corporations that own them. And they’ll never work to use tax money to reduce poverty and inequality in America. Crime, after all, helps them beat Democrats.

Nor do they want to restructure our society in a way that gives working people the power to demand higher wages and better working conditions (unions), thus reducing both poverty and inequality.

And you can bet your bottom dollar they’ll continue complaining about the crime that they’ve created, particularly in the election ads they’ll start running next year.

[L'Emmerdeur]

From the uff da desk:

'Another One?! Arizona GOPers Could Re-Audit Maricopa County's 2020 Results'

The politicized “audit” of Maricopa County, Arizona’s 2020 vote is weeks behind schedule, overseen by a conspiracy theorist, fueled by untraceable private donations, and may well produce an inaccurate count.

So why not try again?

The Arizona Republic reported Friday that the GOP-controlled Arizona Senate is close to signing a second recount deal, this time using digital images of the county’s ballots rather than the real paper objects.

The auditor this time, rather than “Cyber Ninjas,” would be the nonprofit Citizens Oversight, which, similarly, had no experience auditing elections prior to Donald Trump’s months-long tantrum over losing his reelection bid.

The group’s founder Ray Lutz told the Republic that the audit would amount to a “grand test” of his technology, which he calls “AuditEngine,” and which purports to be able to re-tabulate ballots cast on other machines.

“I think it is certainly a big test for me, because I have put a lot of work on it for the last year and a half or so,” Lutz said. “We have enhanced it to the point now where I believe we can do a lot to provide information about how well (this election) went.”

[Brian Peacock]

For America, the class war is not over.

[JimC]

Political theatre...

[Sean Hayden]

--he's looking forward to testing his new software toy during what is supposed to be a meaningful audit of the results.

[Brian Peacock]

One for Biden
One for Trump

Two for Biden
Two for Trump

Three for Biden
Three for Trump

...

[Tero]

B5FAB58B-2080-4478-9709-B95540182636.jpeg (193.95 KiB) Viewed 1414 times

[Seabass]

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/worl ... 57838.html
https://www.nydailynews.com/coronavirus ... story.html
https://www.newsweek.com/pastor-rick-wi ... de-1596221

Anti-vaxxer hospitalised with Covid after saying vaccines would wipe out ‘stupid people’

Rick Wiles, a right-wing Christian talk show host and anti-vaxxer has been hospitalised with Covid-19 after saying vaccines would wipe out “stupid people”.

Less than a month ago, Mr Wiles said he would never get vaccinated. His website, TruNews, announced over the weekend that had been infected and taken to hospital where he had been given oxygen. The announcement was reported by Right Wing Watch.

TruNews has pushed conspiracy theorists considered to be racist, antisemitic, homophobic, and Islamophobic. The outlet has called President Obama a “demon from hell” multiple times. Mr Wiles has said that Mr Obama “spiritually sodomised the nation”.

The right-wing broadcaster told his audience last month that he wasn’t getting vaccinated because he believed the vaccines were being used to commit a “genocide,” to kill hundreds of millions of people.

“I am not going to be vaccinated,” Mr Wiles said. “I’m going to be one of the survivors. I’m going to survive the genocide ... The only good thing that will come out of this is a lot of stupid people will be killed off. If the vaccine wipes out a lot of stupid people, well, we’ll have a better world.”

TruNews has said that eternal damnation would await anyone mocking Mr Wiles’s affliction.

“Already, the naysayers and mockers have started with their taunts,” the website said. “Let them speak their foolish words and let them mock. It will only serve to be used to fuel their flames of torment in hell unless they repent.”

TruNews suddenly suspended its broadcast last week, announcing that it was “experiencing a sudden cluster of flu and COVID among some employees and their relatives”.

The outlet then said on Sunday that Mr Wiles had been hospitalised.

TruNews has announced that Lauren Witzke, a Republican Senate candidate in Delaware in 2020, will fill in and co-host his nightly TV programme for the next two weeks.

The Daily Beast reported that Ms Witzke has pushed conspiracy theories related to QAnon, antisemitism, Flat Earth, and 9/11.

[JimC]

Karma is a bitch...

[Tero]

Jenner says girls have to earn transgender status:
During an interview with Fox News about her decision to run for governor of California as a Republican, Jenner talked about her idea for a solution to the issue of transgender girls participating in school sports. Her idea is to create a government commission to judge the worthiness of trans girls.

This contradicted an earlier statement from Jenner where she expressed she thought it "isn't fair" for trans girls to compete in girls' sports at all.

https://www.comicsands.com/jenner-trans ... 86728.html

[Sean Hayden]

Sports is hardly fair.