2022 Midterm Elections

[Howl]

Wyoming primaries are coming up soon so it's debate season, but more like a bar scene from Star Wars. Adam Kinzinger nails it: 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

More stupidity, this time from AZ:

 

[Howl]

Remember early on in the Trump years we were all posting memes with people burying their face in their hands, like Oh heck no  Just no. No no no?  We're back to that, except Now!  New and improved!  With Despair! 

[GreyhoundFan]

Even Herschel's employees don't seem to like him:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I believe Herschel suffered too many head injuries while playing football. He truly needs help and shouldn't be placed front and center by the GQP.

 

[Audrey2]

6 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I believe Herschel suffered too many head injuries while playing football. He truly needs help and shouldn't be placed front and center by the GQP.

 

Must be why Trump and Trumpers like him. He's one of the few people who can make them feel smart.

[GreyhoundFan]

From Eugene Robinson: "If Herschel Walker wins in Georgia, America will have lost its mind"

Quote

It’s not yet clear who will be the weirdest and most unfit Republican Senate candidate in November. But my early pick is Herschel Walker in Georgia. If he wins — and he could — this nation has truly lost its mind.

The flashing red lights and blaring sirens are not just about the former football star’s myriad lies and stunning hypocrisy. That kind of stuff doesn’t necessarily trouble GOP voters in the least, given their continued devotion to Donald Trump, who counts Walker as a longtime friend. It’s Walker’s combination of utter ignorance and total confidence, which challenges even that of the former president.

Mind you, Walker does challenge even Trump’s record of dubious achievement on the lies-and-hypocrisy score. For years, he railed against the irresponsibility shown by absent African American fathers. The “fatherless home is a major, major problem” in the Black community, he told conservative radio host Charlie Kirk in 2020. In a 2021 conversation with conservative personalities Diamond and Silk, Walker lamented: “The father leaves in the Black family. He leaves the boys alone so they’ll be raised by their mom. If you have a child with a woman, even if you have to leave that woman … you don’t leave that child.”

That stance became a punchline when it was revealed that Walker, who proudly describes his relationship with his 22-year-old son Christian, is also the father of three other children of whom he does not speak — and with whom he is not in regular contact. According to reporting by the Daily Beast, the mother of one of those unmentioned children, a 10-year-old boy, had to sue Walker to get him to pay child support.

I’m old enough to remember when one secret “love child” was enough to end the political career of John Edwards, who twice was a credible candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. Three secret offspring haven’t slowed Walker down any more than would-be tacklers did when he was barreling down the field for touchdowns at the University of Georgia.

As for lies, Walker claimed he graduated from college when he didn’t, claimed he had “worked in law enforcement” when he didn’t, and claimed he owned “the largest minority-owned chicken business in the United States” when he didn’t.

We’ve had liars and hypocrites in the Senate before — we have some now, actually — and the republic has survived. But to an alarming degree, even for a senator, Walker seems to believe he knows everything about everything — while his words suggest he knows nothing about anything at all.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, this is how he explained his views on climate change to a group of Republican activists: “We don’t control the air. Our good air decided to float over to China’s bad air. So when China gets our good air, their bad air has got to move. So it moves over to our good air space. Then, now, we’ve got we to clean that back up.”

This is how, in March, he explained his doubts about evolution: “At one time, science said man came from apes. Did it not? ... If that is true, why are there still apes? Think about it.”

This is how he promised right-wing podcast host Glenn Beck a quack cure for covid in August 2020: “Do you know, right now, I have something that can bring you into a building that would clean you from covid as you walk through this dry mist?”

And this is what he said on Fox News two days after the Uvalde, Tex., school shooting: “Cain killed Abel and that’s a problem that we have. What we need to do is look into how we can stop those things. You know, you talked about doing a disinformation — what about getting a department that can look at young men that’s looking at women that’s looking at their social media. What about doing that? Looking into things like that and we can stop that that way.”

Even by the standards of today’s Senate, a body of which Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) is a member, this is incoherent, “Looney Tunes” babble — even if Walker rambled his way around to a generally sensible position: increasing funding for mental health treatment.

While Walker wanders along the campaign trail, Walker’s Democratic rival, incumbent Sen. Raphael G. Warnock, has concentrated on emphasizing what he has accomplished for Georgians in his brief time in office. Despite the choice between crazed and competent, polls show Walker and Warnock in a statistical tie.

Warnock won his seat in a runoff election on Jan. 5, 2021, after Trump, furious at having lost the state, told Georgia Republicans that their votes wouldn’t be counted fairly. Trump essentially gifted Warnock his seat. Now, by endorsing Walker, let’s hope Trump may be doing it again.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Dr. Oz is upset because his opponent is running on the issues.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Dr. Oz made another sad attempt to troll Fetterman.

 

 

 

 

The Lincoln Project did a "fixed that for you":

Spoiler

 

And Fetterman's reply to Oz is good:

Spoiler

 

[GreyhoundFan]

[fraurosena]

This one's pretty funny too.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

This Gibbs dude made me start shouting.

[Audrey2]

Oh Madison, you do want to be just like your idol, Donald Trump, don't you?

Madison Cawthorn spent campaign donations he was supposed to return on 'egregiously' frequent trips to Chick-fil-A and other businesses and now can't pay donors back, report says 

https://www.yahoo.com/news/madison-cawthorn-spent-campaign-donations-064721233.html

Spoiler

Madison Cawthorn spent donation money meant for his general campaign during his primary campaign.

An anonymous source told the Daily Beast that Cawthorn's campaign cannot return the donations.

The source called Cawthorn's use of funds "outrageous" and pointed out his frequent personal spending.

Madison Cawthorn may be in violation of campaign laws as a result of the "outrageous" spending of campaign funds meant to be used during his now-defunct general election campaign, an anonymous source told the Daily Beast.

According to the source, the North Carolina GOP Representative's campaign had so little money during the end of his primary that they were forced to spend general fund money during the primary.

However, election laws do not allow for those funds to be spent until the general election. If a candidate loses their primary, they must return it to donors.

Cawthorn lost his primary against GOP candidate Chuck Edwards on May 17.

The campaign source also told the Daily Beast that Cawthorn's campaign spent "egregiously," referring to $1500 spent at Chick-fil-A, $21,000 spent for lodging in Florida, and nearly $3,000 at a place listed as Papa's Beer.

The state of Cawthorn's campaign spending is not known to the public because the campaign is late on its last FEC filing, the source told the Daily Beast. According to the FEC, the deadline to file the latest quarterly report is July 15.

According to Cawthorn's latest filing, which covers his campaign from Jan 1 through April 27, the campaign was already operating at a deficit, with $324,566 in debts owed compared to $137,598 of cash on hand.

FEC data shows that by the end of April Cawthorn spent $3.3 million, which was nearly all of the campaign funds raised since January 2021.

"There was just no money," the campaign source said. "It was dollar-in, dollar-out. So if he loses it's a really bad thing, and the only way to cover it is getting money straight from the candidate or treasurer."

Experts told the Daily Beast that Cawthorn can also pay his donors back by fundraising, using his own money, or starting another campaign, which the anonymous source said he is unwilling to do.

A spokesperson for Cawthorn did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

A few things to unpack...

1. Well I know the daily beast is not a top quality news source even if this is just mud I am thoroughly enjoying it! 

2. $3,000 to Papa's beer? How many times did you go out drinking with your buddy Kavanaugh?

3. Is anyone else just shocked that a Republican overspent and bent / broke campaign finance rules?

I'm not usually a fan of mud. However I am enjoying seeing this come out, just like I am enjoying the three negative pamphlets I've gotten in the mail against the man who's running against my Congress critter. While I'm not saying I have a fantastic Congress critter, he's a Republican after all, the candidate they're smearing is much worse. He does have Trump's endorsement though. (The candidate, not my Congress critter.)

 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"A repulsive new breed of Trumpist candidates poses a fresh threat"

Quote

Donald Trump is delivering a speech Tuesday in which he proclaims to be for law and order. He is doing this a half a mile from the Capitol, where he incited numerous crimes on his behalf amid an extraordinarily corrupt and potentially criminal scheme planned and executed by Trump himself.

If that seems jarring, please note: That incongruence increasingly defines a trend represented by a new breed of Trumpist candidates.

Their common trait? They cast themselves as tough on law and order while embracing the most pernicious aspects of Trump’s effort to persuade millions to give up on the rule of law and democracy, and to remain above accountability for his attempt to destroy our legal and political order at its foundations.

Some of these candidates are feeding the public the same lies Trump used to inspire those criminal acts on Jan. 6, 2021. Others are hand-waving away those same crimes. Still others are scoffing at the need for any accountability at all for Trump’s coup attempt.

The “rule of law” involves certain hallmarks: Equality before the law, stable political and legal institutions, a commitment to accountability, and no special treatment for the very powerful. These candidates are making an utter mockery of such notions: They combine phony pieties about lawful and civil order with craven fealty to Trump’s lawlessness and his bid for utter impunity, and to the undisguised authoritarian nature of his movement.

Take Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania. Mastriano has made law and order an important part of his campaign, insisting Democrats are anti-police while being driven by a “culture of lawlessness.”

But Mastriano was a leader of Trump’s effort to overturn his 2020 loss and pushed the radical theory that presidential electors can be appointed in defiance of the popular vote, based on lies about fraud. He aggressively fed the stolen-election fiction, which inspired many Jan. 6 defendants and continues to mislead countless Americans about the integrity of our electoral institutions.

Or take Scott Jensen, the leading GOP candidate for governor in Minnesota. He cites crime as a top priority, hyping 2020 “riots” during which cities were “burned and looted.” Meanwhile, he has refused to say Trump lost in 2020 and even called for the jailing of Minnesota’s Democratic secretary of state, sneering that he might “look good in stripes.”

Calls for jailing members of the opposition for presiding over elections that yielded hated outcomes — Jensen baselessly suggested the Democrat had “gotten away” with a 2020 scam — is textbook lawlessness. It’s doubly galling coming from someone who piously invokes law and order.

Then there’s Adam Laxalt, the GOP nominee for Senate in Nevada. He recently hosted an event with Trump himself designed to showcase law-and-order toughness. Yet Laxalt lent support to the stolen-election lie, suggested voting in urban areas is suspect while claiming it’s “legitimate” in GOP areas, and dramatically downplayed Jan. 6, claiming “very few” people broke laws.

This is becoming a pattern, as some Democrats pointed out to me, though in some cases it’s not as pronounced. In Wisconsin, the frontrunner in the GOP gubernatorial primary, Rebecca Kleefish, is vowing to be tough on crime while falsely claiming 2020 was “rigged.”

In Colorado, GOP gubernatorial nominee Heidi Ganahl is touting anti-crime toughness. But she tapped a running mate who initially pushed 2020 conspiracy theories, though he later repudiated them.

In Ohio, GOP Senate nominee J.D. Vance recorded a special Jan. 6 anniversary video describing the House committee investigating Trump’s coup as a “show trial.” He claimed it portended a law enforcement crackdown on the real victims related to Jan. 6 — i.e., millions of conservative voters.

Vance even paired this with his own law-and-order invocations of what he described as the Black Lives Matter “summer of riots.” He called for the next GOP administration to turn loose law enforcement on George Soros and Rachel Maddow. Vance has dismissed the idea that former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon should face accountability for defying the Jan. 6 committee’s lawful subpoena.

That’s not to mention scores of GOP candidates running for positions of control over elections while remaining committed to treating future losses as non-binding and subject to nullification.

In a way, it’s not that surprising that these candidates are adopting a tough-on-crime platform while embracing Trump’s lies about our elections, or dismissing the importance of accountability for Jan. 6, or demanding prosecution of political opponents. Republicans have long campaigned as tough on crime; now they’re hoping to harness voter energy by feeding Trumpism’s pathologies.

Yet the adoption of these positions in tandem represents something particularly despicable and destructive. To one degree or another, they’re winking at — or actively embracing — an underlying ethos that Trump perfected.

The essence of that ethos is to detach the aim of “law and order” from any rooted conception of the rule of law by unabashedly casting aside ideals of neutrality, equal institutional treatment and freedom from political interference, and flaunting this as a selling point.

When Trump ran for reelection in 2020 on a “law and order” platform after a first term saturated in corruption and lawlessness perhaps unparalleled in U.S. history, I argued that “law and order” without the rule of law is neither law nor order.

What remains unknown is how far these Trumpist candidates will push this ethos and whether they’ll be able to import it into positions of real power.

 

[47of74]

Yeah a GQP candidate from Florida said that.  And I’m not the only one pointing out wrong….

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Vance is disgusting. I hope the voters of Ohio don't foist him on the whole country:

 

[47of74]

Yeah I have a new cat toy. Filled full of catnip too. 

I’ll probably be going to her twitter prayer closet before too long.  
 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

[GreyhoundFan]

17 hours ago, 47of74 said:

Yeah I have a new cat toy. Filled full of catnip too. 

 

 

I love this clap back on Lavern:

[47of74]

The cat toy gift that continues to give

[GreyhoundFan]

Fetterman continues with his string of great ads:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

[WiseGirl]

Here we go again.

"The Justice Department unveiled on Friday a conspiracy charge against a Russian national accused of working with FSB agents and using unnamed political groups in the US as foreign agents of Russia." 

https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/29/politics/russian-influence-separatist-groups-charges/index.html

[WiseGirl]

This is me in November.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Such an informed candidate...