2022 Midterm Elections

[GreyhoundFan]

So Todd's family doesn't seem enamored of Sarah:

[GreyhoundFan]

Another day, another cringey video from Herschel:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I can't believe anyone has paid him a penny to hear his addled thoughts.

[WiseGirl]

Yes they are out of their minds 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Aw, bless her heart, she has a degree in Law & Order.  

[GreyhoundFan]

"Beto O’Rourke’s risky quest for votes in deep-red Texas"

Quote

SPEARMAN, Tex. — Everyone in this 3,087-person Panhandle city knows that Beto O’Rourke is coming to campaign for governor today. It’s a major event, a big-time politician coming all the way out here, deep into rural oil country, where the landscape is dotted with pump jacks and cattle and grain elevators, and the worst drought in 10 years has sucked up all the water in the Canadian River so it’s just a dry bed of red dirt.

“People are buzzing! It’s a big buzz,” says Suzanne Bellsnyder, who owns the one coffee shop downtown. Local gossip networks have already alerted her that Beto (he’s achieved one-name celebrity status in these parts, like Cher) is next door having lunch. It’s a Saturday afternoon, and he’ll be speaking in a park, with the temperature hitting 105 degrees.

People are buzzing in a good way? Like, excited?

She smiles. Well, what do you think? Beto mustered only 8 percent of the vote here in 2018 when he ran as the Democratic candidate for Senate against the Republican incumbent, Sen. Ted Cruz. That’s 138 votes out of 1,710 cast in all of Hansford County. “We don’t even have a Democrat primary,” says Bellsnyder, who is the former chair of the county’s Republican Party. “I mean, they hold one, but 12 people vote or something.” (Fact check: It was actually eight people in 2018 and 14 in 2022.)

The buzz had started in right-wing Facebook groups, where a protest was being planned. There was chatter about whether to bring guns. “Did you see the guy with the AR-15?” Beto asks me a few days later. “He was wearing it, coming toward the door, which is not unusual for us.” It’s also not unusual for a dozen shouting Republicans to confront Beto outside a town hall meeting of 337 people and then post videos on Twitter saying they’d run him out of town.

Maybe it’s a fool’s errand or just a kamikaze mission of hope, but Beto is holding more than 70 public events in 49 days trying to convince people in mostly small, rural and often incredibly red towns around the state that he should be their next governor. It’s part of a campaign strategy fueled by the fact that four years ago he came closer than any Democrat in a generation to winning a statewide office in his Senate race — within 220,000 votes, or 2.6 percent. Which in Texas counts as close.

Beto is targeting GOP strongholds that former president Donald Trump won with 70, 80 or even 90 percent of the vote just two years ago, making his schedule public and inviting the entire community to join. If there are votes out there to push him over the top, that means turning over every couch cushion in every corner of the state — even in conservative oil, agriculture and ranching country where many people are thrilled with two-term incumbent Republican governor Greg Abbott, who signed a trigger law banning most abortions and who has spent the summer busing migrants to D.C. and New York City, while blaming it all on President Biden.

Could a victory for Beto lie not in liberal cities such as Austin or Houston but in spending these last precious three months of the campaign driving his Toyota Tundra to the least populous, most Republican parts of the state, mining for untapped votes?

“I mean, there’s a reason to do this,” Beto says in Spearman, sweating through his white button-down. Having been married for 17 years, Beto often says, he knows no two people agree on everything, but he’s hoping people around here might at least like his plans to repair Texas’s power grid or to pay teachers more.

If nothing else, maybe they’ll respect that he came.

“I understand that if we’re only interested in those who are already with us, we’ll never get there,” he says, “We’ll end up in the same place every Democrat has for the last 28 years.” That’s how long it’s been since Texas had a Democrat as governor, when Ann Richards held the job.

For six days and 10 events, I chased Beto from west to east across the state — a sliver of this mostly rural tour that began in his hometown of El Paso last month and traces the perimeter of the state, including the border with Mexico, before ending near Dallas in September.

And when I say chased, I mean it. The man drives as if he’s a criminal trying to lose a tail, easily going 95 to 100 mph at times.

“If we want to create 30 minutes to eat lunch, we gotta drive fast,” he says, devouring a chocolate-dipped ice cream cone at a Dairy Queen. (A week after I left him, police pulled him over outside of Galveston and warned him to slow down.)

It’s a typical marathon schedule for the 49-year-old father of three, who wakes up at 6 every morning to go for a four-mile run before driving himself and three staffers to every event, as well as knocking on doors in temperatures so high that tar from the road melts onto your shoes.

But does he really have a chance? This time?

It’s a long shot, but maybe. Last week a video of Beto cursing at a heckler at one of his events drew national attention. “It may be funny to you … but it’s not funny to me,” he snapped when an Abbott supporter laughed while he described how 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde had been massacred by an 18-year-old with a legally purchased AR-style rifle. As far as encounters go at his town hall meetings, it was pretty tame.

He also got a fundraising bump in late May after he interrupted Abbott during a news conference in Uvalde, shouting, “You are doing nothing!” after the governor said that tougher gun laws were not the answer and had shifted the focus to mental health.

meeting supporters who stand in a photo line. (Nick Oxford for The Washington Post)

Recent polls have Beto pulling within five to six percentage points of Abbott’s lead, a five-point gain from where he was in April — and still a football field away from the margin of error. In July, he set a record for the most money ever raised by a Texas candidate in a single quarter, an astounding $27.6 million in four months, most of it through hundreds of thousands of small donations — and $3 million more than Abbott. Still, the governor has $40 million more than Beto ready to deploy on advertising in the fall.

From outside Texas — and certainly among Republicans in Texas — there can be a weariness to seeing Beto back on the trail. This is his third at-bat for a major office in five years: failed Senate run, failed 2020 presidential bid, and now taking on Abbott in what’s predicted to be a terrible election year for Democrats, with an unpopular Democratic president, and in a state where Republicans win the vast majority of elections.

Beto’s no longer the party’s rising star. He’s got a reputation: that guy who runs and loses.

In these rural areas, Beto is essentially drilling for oil. “There are a lot of votes out there,” Beto says. “There are 7 million people who didn’t cast a ballot who were eligible in 2020.” There are the first-time voters and the Democrats who need an extra push to vote in the midterms and the people who don’t stick to party lines. “I would say they are persuadable,” he says.

And then there are the votes no political scientist could tell him how to find. In Dumas, a Panhandle city that’s 55 percent Hispanic, truck driver Pablo Campos tells Beto he woke up at 3:30 a.m. so he could complete half his work shift and have enough time to go to the town hall gathering during his break. There, Mary Jane Garcia, 47, a devout Catholic, stood up to talk about the “spontaneous abortion” that saved her life when she miscarried at 17, and how scared she is that her daughters might be denied that medical care.

Over in Quanah, a city of 2,272, Darby Sparkman, 23, was astounded to see 64 people at Beto’s town hall meeting, since she’s an election worker and “like 10 people vote Democrat.” Edith Aguirre, 26, was among the nearly 200 people who showed up in Bowie, a growing city of 5,534 in verdant North Texas, where the radio stations veer from country to worship to worship country. She was brought here as a child from Mexico so her father could work in the oil fields. She’s not a citizen and can’t vote but brought her sister, Ashley, who turns 18 this year. They wept while talking about how Ashley will be the first voter in her family.

Beto’s visiting many of these small towns for the second, fifth or seventh time. Crowds have been rapturous and far bigger than expected, like the 1,000-plus people who came out in highly conservative Lubbock, or in Whitesboro, a majority-White city of 4,217 near the Oklahoma border, where campaign staffers had to rent another room at the church they’d booked to accommodate the extra 200 people who showed up — for a total of 410 (along with 100 Republican protesters outside, who brought a band). Eventually, a sweat-drenched Beto answered questions standing in a doorway between the people in the pews and the overflow crowd next door.

That frenzied scene eclipses anything from his Senate run, says Glenn Melancon, Democratic chair of Grayson County, who introduced Beto in Whitesboro. He was a sensation in 2018, but he was new and unproven — a relative nobody around the state, even as El Paso’s three-term congressman. Now people across Texas feel as if they have a relationship with him. “The first time around, there’s some excitement,” Melancon says, “but then he came back and he came back, and more and more people get to know it’s not a show. It’s real.”

If deeply conservative places like Spearman are his path to victory, though, it’s going to be a bumpy road.

Beto is holding his town hall gathering in a park. According to Beto’s press director, Chris Evans, the owner of the restaurant they originally booked called and explained that his staff might have signed off, but he was not okay with it.

By the time Beto arrives, people in MAGA and NRA hats, carrying “Pro-life” and “Build the Wall” signs or wearing “Team Jesus” T-shirts make up three-quarters of the 70-person crowd. Beto’s staff has invited them to join the town hall meeting in the shade.

One attendee is wearing a T-shirt that reads “Come and take it,” the Texas independence slogan that’s been adopted to counter Beto’s forceful declaration, “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47,” at a 2019 presidential debate a month after a 21-year-old white supremacist drove six hours to a Walmart store in El Paso with an AK-47 and killed 23 people, on a mission to stop a “Hispanic invasion.” Beto flew home that day from the campaign trail and went straight to the county hospital. He says he still keeps in touch with a woman whose husband was shot while trying to raise money for a girls soccer team to go to Arizona. Her father-in-law also was shot and died.

“Marcela said, ‘Why does anyone need a gun like that?’” Beto says during a lunch break. “And I just knew that if I were to be honest with Marcela, the answer is nobody needs to have an AK-47. Nobody.”

Back in Spearman, Beto is just over a minute into his usually 30-minute introductory speech when the shouting starts.

“You don’t protect the Second Amendment!”

“I am encouraging your right to speak right now,” says Beto. “And I’m glad that you’re here and I’m glad that you said that.”

“You’re trying to take our rights away!”

He rolls with it. “Okay, let’s get right into the question-and-answer portion!” Everybody but the shouting people laughs.

For over an hour he takes the barrage. If he cares about kids, why doesn’t he care about unborn babies? (“I just very strongly and very much trust women to make their own decisions … about their own bodies.”) How’s he going to pay for his free-college plan for people who agree to be nurses or teachers in rural areas? (Legalize cannabis and tax corporations more.) Doesn’t he know people need AR-15s to shoot feral hogs or to hunt deer and birds? (“Well, you know what? You must be a pretty poor shot,” Beto snaps back. Even the guys in MAGA hats laugh at that.)

Leaving the town hall gathering, Gyene Spivey, Republican chair of Hansford County, who organized the protest, says Beto didn’t change any minds, but she respected his right to try. “We love God, we love country, we love our families. We don’t want harm on him. We just don’t want him as our governor.”

Debriefing with his staff later, Beto is in a good mood. He lives to debate. Plus, they got a whole two people to sign up to volunteer.

But there are signs that Spearman exhausted him. He pulls over on a farm road to commune with beautiful brown horses and a pony. “This will be the best part of my day,” he says. And when he arrives at the next stop in Pampa, an oil boom Panhandle city of 16,474, he beelines to the Woody Guthrie Folk Music Center, located in the old pharmacy where the folk music legend once worked.

Beto’s been reading Guthrie’s autobiography with his younger son, Henry, 11, and there is this quote he’s been thinking about a lot. The sentiment goes, Beto says, “‘I don’t like a song that makes you feel fat or skinny or too old or too inexperienced or too this or too that,’” and it’s a lot like what Beto wants to do with his campaign, to help Texans find common ground rather than alienating those who are transgender or immigrants. Guthrie was a uniter, he says. “This guy was for everybody.”

There are more protests down the road in Quanah, where “Come and take it” flags are placed in the windows of his town hall meeting, and in Bowie, where a few dozen Abbott supporters shout “Abbott!” every time someone opens the door.

Things turn tense at the end of that long night in Whitesboro. Beto has stayed around to take photos with constituents. About 60 protesters have stuck it out, too, and a dozen march into the church.

“Hey Beto, we’ve been waiting to talk with you!” says a man with a handgun on his hip. A younger guy has a semiautomatic rifle over his shoulder. Beto meets the man with the handgun in the church aisle and engages with him as he repeats a conspiracy theory that the children in Uvalde died because Biden and the Democratic establishment ordered that the police be held back.

“I think you’re operating in a different reality than the one that we live in right now,” says Beto, only giving up reasoning with the man after he refuses to acknowledge that any police officers died after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

“I want to tell you personally, you’re not welcome in this town. You’re not welcome in this county,” says the man.

“There were a lot of people here who welcomed me into this town and this county,” says Beto, as his road campaign manager Cynthia Cano ushers him out the door.

“Beto, Beto, why are you running away?” protesters shout as Beto inches his truck through the throng. “Why wasn’t he in an electric vehicle and wearing a mask?” one says.

It takes about two minutes for word to spread in Muenster, a hamlet of 1,580 that resembles a German village, in a county he certainly will not win, that Beto’s in town. A white-haired woman shouts, “you’ll never get my AR!” An out-of-towner tells him, “the women and the people with common sense need you,” then refuses to give me her name because she doesn’t want people in her small town to know she likes Beto.

It’s a rare leisurely lunch stop for Beto and his three core staff members — Cano, Evans and videographer Jon Groat. The quartet use his Toyota Tundra as a mobile office and have basically been living on the road since November — but for a brief hiatus in February when someone stole their catalytic converter.

Each day starts with Beto throwing his running clothes over the suitcases in the back of the truck to dry. He drives. Cano sits up front planning events, prepping him for town halls and shooting videos of Beto eating burritos or making a spontaneous detour to a reservoir. Evans and Groat take the back seat, hunched over their computers with noise-canceling headphones.

This is pretty much how they did it in 2018. Only this time, Beto says, they’re more organized. They’ve invested in data to better target voters. Over the past five years they’ve built an army of 80,000 volunteers who knocked on 100,000 doors in June.

He’s also gotten more aggressive. In the Senate race, Beto says, “I wish I’d done more to prosecute the case against Ted Cruz and help people realize how dangerous it was for him to stay in office.” Now, everything he says, he links back to Abbott. “People need to know why their electricity bills are going up, why their property taxes are going up, why the lights didn’t turn on last February,” he says. “It’s Greg Abbott, and just be really clear about that.”

When Beto dropped out of the presidential nomination race in November 2019, he said he didn’t think he’d run for public office again.

He taught a couple college courses on Texas politics. He founded a voting rights organization, Powered by People, aimed at turning Texas blue. He sat around with his family, like everyone else during the pandemic.

But the grid failure in February 2021 that killed hundreds of people outraged him. He started thinking about running for governor, he says, when Democratic lawmakers fled the state in the summer of 2021 to block voting restrictions — only to watch Abbott sign them into law a few months later. Beto entered the race in November.

Before he was a fundraising juggernaut, Beto was a kid who played bass in a punk band. His first true taste of the road was the tours of North America they did on his summer breaks from Columbia University.

This tour, he says, reminds him of those tours. “Driving from town to town, showing up, telling your story, listening to other people’s stories, meeting people in restaurants, bars, cafes, church halls.”

He’s waiting for takeout in the Italian Bistro where he just held his Clarksville town hall, where the heat from 210 bodies — at least 100 more than they were planning for — had overwhelmed the air conditioning.

″Punk rock is about bypassing corporate control of what you listen to and whose story you’re hearing. And the barrier to entry to be able to start a band or put a record out or book a tour — you just do it yourself,” he says. “And this campaign is just, you know, the four of us driving in this truck, going from town to town, showing up, running our own sound system.”

It’s also about going into places where you know you won’t be accepted, and saying what you need to say, in case there’s maybe one person out there who thinks the same way you do and who needs to know they’re not alone.

The takeout arrives, and Beto jumps back into his truck.

 

 

[AlmostSavedAtTacoBell]

On 8/18/2022 at 7:24 PM, GreyhoundFan said:

Aw, bless her heart, she has a degree in Law & Order.  

Joan Cusack/Cynthia would like a word with Lavern Spicer. 

[GreyhoundFan]

Good gravy:

 

[AlmostSavedAtTacoBell]

3 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Good gravy:

 

They really want to be victims so, so much.  I guarantee if Trump told them to wear masks on their asses while tap dancing and eating a can of tuna, there would be a giant run on tuna can sales and tippy tap sounds everywhere. 

[GreyhoundFan]

You couldn't make this up: "Walker, criticizing climate law, asks: ‘Don’t we have enough trees around here?’"

Quote

Georgia Republican Senate nominee Herschel Walker is criticizing the sweeping climate, health-care and deficit-reduction bill signed into law by President Biden, arguing that it includes wasteful spending to combat global warming and asking, “Don’t we have enough trees around here?”

The former NFL football player, who was encouraged to run by former president Donald Trump, has made head-scratching comments that have drawn ridicule. In a July 9 appearance, he spoke about climate change, suggesting that Georgia’s “good air decides to float over” to China, replacing China’s “bad air,” which goes back to Georgia, where “we got to clean that back up.”

In an appearance Sunday, according to an account by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Walker reiterated his opposition to the Inflation Reduction Act, signed by Biden last week, that invests in curbing global warming, among other things.

“They continue to try to fool you that they are helping you out. But they’re not,” Walker said. “Because a lot of money, it’s going to trees. Don’t we have enough trees around here?”

It’s possible Walker might have been referring to a provision in the law that allocates $1.5 billion to the U.S. Forest Service’s Urban and Community Forestry Program.

Walker, in a tweet posted Monday evening, stood by his remarks.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) rankled some fellow Republicans last week when he said his party could fall short of retaking the Senate, citing “candidate quality” as an issue. While McConnell didn’t name names, Walker, in his race to unseat Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D), is among those widely believed to be underperforming.

Walker told the Journal-Constitution over the weekend that he was unfazed by McConnell’s comments.

“I don’t ever worry about stuff like that,” Walker said. “When I got into this race, I got in this race to win it for the people. I said, ‘Guys, I’m here for the people of Georgia.’ I’m not worried about what people say.”

The Journal-Constitution reported that Walker spoke after an event Sunday with the Republican Jewish Coalition in Sandy Springs, Ga.

Warnock’s campaign did not comment on Walker’s remarks, but Dan Gottlieb, a spokesman for the Georgia Democratic Party, told The Washington Post that they show that Walker is unprepared to serve in the Senate.

“The few policies Walker can articulate, like his support for a nationwide abortion ban and opposition to legislation to reduce drug costs for seniors, are harmful to Georgians. But his inability to demonstrate even the most basic understanding of other key issues shows he isn’t ready to represent Georgia in the U.S. Senate,” Gottlieb said.

In June, Walker faced a string of controversies, including that he has two sons and a daughter with different women whom he had not spoken about publicly.

The Journal-Constitution debunked previous claims by Walker that he had worked in law enforcement and had been an FBI agent. The Daily Beast reported that Walker had a 10-year-old son out of wedlock whom he hadn’t discussed publicly. The left-leaning news site reported that Walker also had a 13-year-old son with a different woman as well as an adult daughter he fathered as a college student. Walker has spoken on the campaign trail about his close relationship with another son, 22-year-old Christian.

Walker, who in the past has chided absentee Black fathers, confirmed the Daily Beast’s reporting and said he never hid his other children.

“I have four children. Three sons and a daughter. They’re not ‘undisclosed’ — they’re my kids,” Walker said in a statement sent to The Washington Post. “Saying I hide my children because I don’t discuss them with reporters to win a campaign? That’s outrageous. I can take the heat, that’s politics, but leave my kids alone.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Which Republican Senate candidate is worst? There are so many choices!"

Quote

The race for the title of most incompetent, least electable Republican candidate for the Senate has become a real competition. Thanks, Donald Trump.

The former president’s endorsements led enough bad Senate nominees to primary victories that the GOP’s hopes of seizing control of the chamber — in what should be a Republican year — are fading. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) acknowledged ruefully last week that “candidate quality” is an issue. The “lack thereof” might have been implied, but his point was obvious.

Former football star Herschel Walker, whom Trump muscled his party into nominating against Democratic incumbent Sen. Raphael G. Warnock in Georgia, had an early lead in the contest for hands-down-worst Republican standard-bearer. His across-the-board incoherence remains unmatched. But while Walker trails in the polls, he is actually doing better than some of his Trump-endorsed counterparts in other states.

Take Mehmet Oz, who trails Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman by 7½ points in the RealClearPolitics polling average in the battle for retiring GOP Sen. Patrick J. Toomey’s Pennsylvania seat.

It makes sense that Trump, a former reality television star, backed a reality television physician. But Oz’s supposed media savvy hasn’t made up for his other problems, chief among them, a lack of connection to the state he wants to represent.

Oz, a longtime New Jersey resident, only moved to Pennsylvania two years ago. Fetterman’s campaign has made gleeful, social-media-friendly hay from that fact, pushing for Oz to be nominated to the New Jersey hall of fame and spotlighting the number of Oz’s residences.

It certainly didn’t help last week that a video of Oz going grocery shopping and complaining about inflation went viral. Oz was trying to portray himself as Joe Average. He did not succeed.

In the video, first he gets the name of the store wrong — it was a Redner’s, a well-known Pennsylvania-based chain, not “Wegner’s,” as he called it. He then examines some raw broccoli, asparagus and carrots, and explains, “My wife wants some vegetables for crudités.” Fetterman, a cargo-shorts and hoodie-wearing Joe Average in everything but height, responded: “In PA, we call this a veggie tray” and issued a bumper sticker with the slogan “Let Them Eat Crudité.”

Then, there’s Blake Masters. In Arizona, Republicans had high hopes of defeating incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, who looked vulnerable. But Trump pushed the GOP to nominate Masters, a venture capitalist and political novice who has disturbing support from far-right extremists, and who backs Trump’s false claims about the purported illegitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.

Masters has also attacked McConnell as being “not good at” legislating and has called for him to be replaced as GOP leader in the Senate. While Kelly’s political skills are seen by Democratic strategists as less than dazzling, a Fox News poll last week found him leading Masters by eight points, 50 percent to 42 percent.

In Ohio, the GOP ought to have had a lock on retiring Republican Sen. Rob Portman’s seat; Trump won the state by eight points in 2020. But a mid-August poll by Emerson College showed Republican J.D. Vance ahead of Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan by a mere three points, and a string of earlier polls by the nonpartisan Center Street PAC consistently showed Ryan in the lead.

Vance might have gotten rich writing his best-selling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” but Ryan has deep roots in the state’s post-industrial Youngstown area. Vance was stridently anti-Trump before he became stridently pro-Trump, and — like Walker, Oz and Masters — he is a political novice.

Meanwhile, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a MAGA true-believer, trails Democratic challenger Mandela Barnes by four points, 50 percent to 46 percent, in a recent Fox News poll. Even Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida is suddenly running for his political life against his likely challenger, Democratic Rep. Val Demings. The polling averages have Rubio ahead; but the only recent survey, by the University of North Florida, showed Demings with a four-point lead. These races are close. And given polling errors in Democrats’ favor in recent elections, the contests might be even fiercer than these figures indicate.

Still, if the GOP snatches defeat from the jaws of victory and falls short in the Senate, Trump will be to blame. It is not clear what impact the Supreme Court’s decision striking down Roe v. Wade — made possible by the three justices Trump appointed — will have on Democratic turnout. But if voters across the country come out in huge numbers to support abortion rights, as they did in the recent Kansas referendum, then all bets are off.

Could Democrats even keep their majority in the House? Still unlikely. But watch this space, because it looks impossible to overestimate the damage Trump can do to his own party.

 

[apple1]

15 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

You couldn't make this up: "Walker, criticizing climate law, asks: ‘Don’t we have enough trees around here?’"

 

I want to say that Walker is the kid with the IEP, who many of the other (popular) kids make fun of - and who doesn't recognize that he/Walker is being used. I have no idea whether the majority of Walker's issues are caused by poor education - or by physical brain trauma - or by willful (in his case) lack of education. It's pretty scary.

The fact that he is even a candidate for office makes me want to agree with @fraurosena who thinks every potential candidate should have to take a basic (literacy and civics?) test before they can run.

My sister lives in GA. She thinks GA's voter choices are far worse than I do. (I don't live in GA).

[AnywhereButHere]

https://www.newsweek.com/far-right-activist-laura-loomer-refuses-concede-sobs-about-voter-fraud-1736325

Quote

Far-right activist and congressional candidate Laura Loomer broke into tears as she claimed without evidence that she was illegally robbed of a Republican primary victory on Tuesday.

Incumbent Representative Daniel Webster won Tuesday's GOP primary for Florida's 11th Congressional District, according to the Associated Press. Although Webster won the race with 51 percent of the vote to Loomer's 44 percent with over 95 percent of ballots counted, Loomer refused to concede and instead suggested that the result was fraudulent.

...

"I'm not conceding, because I'm a winner and the reality is our Republican Party is broken to its core," Loomer told supporters in a speech following her loss. "What we have done tonight has really honestly shocked the nation. We have further exposed the corruption within our own feckless, cowardly Republican Party."

"We are losing our country to big-tech election interference," she said as tears streamed down her face. "And I am pleading with the Republican Party to please start taking this issue seriously, because the American people deserve representation."

While the choices there were God-awful and God-awfuler, it is train-wreck entertaining watching them eat themselves. 

[fraurosena]

Who were the crybaby snowflakes again, Laura?

[GreyhoundFan]

Dr. Oz displays a total lack of self-awareness:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

[GreyhoundFan]

I guess if Dr. Oz becomes a senator, we can look forward to more quack "cures".

[apple1]

14 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I guess if Dr. Oz becomes a senator, we can look forward to more quack "cures".

Oz was a cardiac surgeon. He had/has education and access to good information on health-related topics. His issue was/is not even willful ignorance; he KNEW. The state medical board(s) need to remove his license(s) to practice medicine. This falls into the category of willfully causing harm.

[GreyhoundFan]

I am praying Val defeats Marco. I also wouldn't mind seeing her wipe the floor with him.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I hope Evan McMullin defeats Mike Lee for one of the senate seats from Utah. It would be great to oust Lee, whose lips are firmly planted on the orange ass.

[GreyhoundFan]

Just when you think Herschel couldn't be more pitiful, he posts this:

 

[Audrey2]

55 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Just when you think Herschel couldn't be more pitiful, he posts this:

 

Herschel did you get the secret decoder ring and spy kit too?

[GreyhoundFan]

This column is so right. If the GQP takes over the house, it will be insane. "If Republicans take the House, they’re going to impeach Joe Biden"

Quote

Republicans are already planning investigations to embarrass the president if they win control of the House, though they have yet to decide whether to impanel a permanent select committee on Hunter Biden or merely spread a dozen Hunter Biden investigations among existing committees.

For a moment there, you weren’t sure if I was joking, were you? The truth is that there will indeed be Hunter Biden investigations if the GOP takes over, since what to do about the president’s pitiable son is clearly the most pressing challenge America faces; only the permanent select committee idea is fanciful.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), who would lead the Oversight and Reform Committee in a GOP House, says Hunter Biden would be one of its top targets. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a Fox News personality with a side gig as a member of Congress, will be spearheading the effort.

But Hunter probes — along with desk-pounding hearings on other alleged Biden administration misdeeds designed to generate sound bites to be replayed nightly on Fox — will not satisfy the constituency of a GOP majority. Which is why pressure will immediately begin building to impeach President Biden.

For what, you ask? For whatever. It doesn’t matter; what matters is the cycle Republicans will be locked into, in which they both create and respond to the base’s demand for more combativeness, more scandal and, ultimately, a way to strike a fatal blow at the president they loathe.

The loopier House Republicans are already preparing to impeach Biden, as The Hill reports. No fewer than eight impeachment resolutions have been introduced in this Congress by the likes of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). With control of the House, that desire will likely build and expand, to the point where the party leadership could find it impossible to resist.

If you remember the 1998 impeachment of Bill Clinton, this sounds awfully familiar. The fact that impeachment was a political disaster for Republicans will do little to restrain them from doing it all over again.

During the Clinton years, the Republican base was just as interested in wild conspiracy theories as the Trumpist base is now. Rep. Dan Burton of Indiana, the Jim Jordan of his day, fired a bullet into a head-shaped fruit, probably a cantaloupe, in his backyard in a deranged attempt to prove that Vince Foster, a friend of the Clintons’ who died by suicide, had been murdered. It was a common belief among the GOP base that Bill and Hillary Clinton had murdered dozens if not hundreds of their political enemies.

It was only when Kenneth Starr’s endless Whitewater investigation discovered Clinton’s affair with a young staffer — a thing that actually happened — that Republicans moved ahead with impeachment. They thought they had the president dead to rights, and were shocked to discover that most Americans did not share their white-hot eagerness to remove him. His approval rating just after the Senate voted to acquit him was a remarkable 68 percent.

Just as relevant is what happened after 2010, when Republicans took the House and embarked on just the kind of investigation-palooza they’re now planning. They searched desperately for a Barack Obama scandal and kept coming up empty, for the simple reason that his administration, beyond a few banal controversies, was relatively free of misbehavior and malfeasance.

When that combined with an endless series of pointless votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act that became less a symbol of determination than of futility, the Republican base grew increasingly frustrated. They began to see their party’s leadership (then led by John A. Boehner of Ohio) as feckless and feeble. They became angrier and angrier, and the eventual result was that they turned to Donald Trump, a candidate who encouraged and embodied their seething rage.

If the GOP takes the House again, Trump himself will continue to call for revenge, not only for his two impeachments but for the mere fact that he lost the 2020 election. His supporters will undoubtedly agree, and demand action. Does anyone think Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has the fortitude to resist?

So what will they impeach Biden for? They’re tossing around ideas: His border policies are slightly less draconian than Trump’s, or the Afghanistan withdrawal was chaotic or something about Hunter.

It’s all pretty weak sauce, and Republicans with the remotest grip on reality know you can’t impeach a president merely because he’s from the other party and you don’t like losing.

Which is the real reason they want to do it, and the reason they’re likely to follow through. So with the base growing more and more furious, they’ll search for something, anything, they can use to justify Biden’s impeachment, no matter how ridiculous.

If impeachment doesn’t happen by the end of 2023 with a Republican-controlled House, it would be a shock. And it could all but guarantee Biden’s reelection.

 

Edited August 30, 2022 by GreyhoundFan

[SassyPants]

On 8/25/2022 at 2:41 PM, GreyhoundFan said:

I guess if Dr. Oz becomes a senator, we can look forward to more quack "cures".

Let’s not forget the Senate already has Rand Paul, also a Dr who has made some horrible remarks about Covid, vaccines etc-

[GreyhoundFan]

This sounds like a cry for help.