2022 Midterm Elections

[Cartmann99]

More nuttery from Kristina Karamo:

Michigan secretary of state candidate Kristina Karamo: Beyoncé, Cardi B, Korean drama, and yoga are tools of Satan

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Kristina Karamo, the Republican-endorsed candidate for Michigan secretary of state, was previously a podcast host who claimed that certain celebrities are tools of Satan. Karamo suggested that a “super crafty” Satan is behind Beyoncé pulling “Black Americans into paganism,” called Cardi B a “tool of Lucifer because she peddles filth in the culture,” and said that people practicing yoga are doing “a demonic ceremony.” 

*Raises hand* Is it okay to eat yogurt if it's not the Satan on the bottom kind?

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Karamo also said that Ariana Grande and Billie Eilish have been putting children under a “satanic delusion” and criticized a Korean drama in which characters communicate with their ancestors, saying that they’re actually communicating with “demons.” 

Over the weekend, Michigan Republicans endorsed Karamo as the party’s choice for secretary of state. Karamo is a community college professor and commentator who has appeared on Fox News. 

Karamo has frequently pushed the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from then-President Donald Trump, who has endorsed her. She is also part of a QAnon-connected “coalition” that has been attempting to recruit and elect like-minded secretary of state candidates. Last year Karamo attended a QAnon conference organized by “QAnon John,” and she appears to still keep in contact with him. She additionally has promoted conspiracy theories about the January 6 insurrection and has also repeatedly made anti-LGBTQ remarks.

[Cartmann99]

 

[Audrey2]

5 hours ago, Howl said:

This is adorable.  What kind of things prompt this response?

It works for everything. Someone is trying to talk to you while you're sitting on the carpet in our listening area, someone bumps into you in line, someone wants to cut in line, someone grabs a pencil or a crayon from right in front of you where you have it set out to work... It's basically an all-purpose way to say I don't care for what you're doing please stop.

[Cartmann99]

 

[Cartmann99]

 

[Cartmann99]

 

[Alisamer]

15 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

 

Isn't that the OPPOSITE of the anti-public-school party line they seem to be developing?

If your constituents' kids are being molested daily at home, seems like it'd be more important than ever to have school as a safe place with mandated reporters there to help them. 

Also if your constituents are all child molesters, maybe you should rethink everything ever.

[Cartmann99]

For those unfamiliar with the Guidestones, this short video from 2011 covers the highlights:

For more information, including pictures taken during construction and the full English inscription, please visit  Elbert County's website.

[Alisamer]

1 hour ago, Cartmann99 said:

So wait, weren't these the same people against tearing down statues of Confederate leaders? As usual, do as they say, not as they do.

Also, seems like I've seen other groups of religious extremists destroying monuments... Hmm... 

[Cartmann99]

 

[Cartmann99]

[Cartmann99]

 

[Cartmann99]

Herschel Walker skipped the Republican Senate debate.

 

[47of74]

On 4/25/2022 at 11:46 AM, Cartmann99 said:

She's the type that gives guns as presents at baby showers.

 

I’m into bet hedging at this point. As in blue states telling red states fuck you we quit and leaving the union.  And still doing so no matter how much Taylor, COVID Kim, or other GQP douche cannons beg us to stay.  

[47of74]

Some good news out of Michigan 

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In an upset win Tuesday, Democrat Carol Glanville defeated Republican Robert “RJ” Regan in a special election for a Michigan House seat that had only ever been held by a Republican.

Results remain unofficial, but with all precincts in the district reporting, Glanville led Regan by more than 1,500 votes as of 10:30 p.m. She topped 51% of the total votes cast; Regan garnered 40% and 7.9% went to write-ins.

The district was one of four House districts with special elections to fill vacant seats on Tuesday. A number of municipalities also had local proposals on the ballot.

Regan made national headlines in March for suggesting rape victims "lie back and enjoy it," after he promoted conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 pandemic and shared antisemitic rhetoric. He was favored to win in the heavily Republican district.

 

[Cartmann99]

Majewski wants to represent Ohio-09.

 

[Cartmann99]

Rest of the thread 👇

Spoiler

 

 

[Cartmann99]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Herschel Walker’s insulting campaign is the worst kind of sports idolatry"

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It’s difficult not to pity Private C.J. Memphis in Charles Fuller’s 1982 Pulitzer Prize-winning play “A Soldier’s Play,” which examines prejudice and racial stereotypes — on both sides of the color line — through a segregated Army unit at a base in a pre-Civil Rights Movement Deep South. C.J., who is Black like all but a couple of the characters, suffers all the side effects of being purposefully miseducated in a Jim Crow America. But he’s likable as a standout on the baseball team. For playing his guitar. For singing to everyone’s delight.

Except in the eyes of the unit’s Black sergeant Vernon C. Waters, who subscribes to a strident, no shuckin’-and-jivin’ approach to Black liberation, C.J. is an unwitting tool for a recalcitrant White America, a means for it to invalidate calls for Black advancement.

It’s reminiscent of a real-life Black man revered for his athleticism and heretofore seen as just happy-go-lucky: the great running back from the University of Georgia, Herschel Walker.

I feel as similarly sorry for Walker as for the fictional C.J. Memphis, for Walker — a good ol’ product of some small Southern town like C.J. — is no less an unknowing device for a part of White America attempting to nullify Black arguments for continued progress.

What Walker represents is the worst of our idolatry of sports stars.

This is a revelation about Walker that comes about as he makes the rounds as a U.S. senatorial candidate propped up by former president Donald Trump and reactionary republicans in Georgia in an attempt to unseat Sen. Raphael G. Warnock, the state’s first Black senator and the first Black Democratic senator from the South. Ironically, Warnock was swept into office in January 2021 with a boost from athletic bona fides. Not his own, but those of WNBA players. They openly campaigned for Warnock against the senator he defeated, Kelly Loeffler, who at the time was a co-owner of the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream, where she caught the ire of league players for denouncing Black Lives Matter and backing antiabortion causes.

Walker’s sole qualification for Georgia’s electorate, however, is his athletic notoriety. He isn’t like Warnock, an ordained minister who pastors at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church made famous by a former pastor, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., or thrice graduated — first from Morehouse and then Union Theological Seminary, where Warnock was awarded a master’s and PhD.

Indeed, Walker’s campaign managers late last year quietly scrubbed his biography of the claim he graduated from Georgia. He won a Heisman trophy there, but not a degree.

Walker is embarrassingly unqualified to be an elected official at any level, let alone in the U.S. Senate.

He is hardly the first United States athlete to pursue elected office. Just in the past couple election cycles, Burgess Owens, who played safety for the Jets and then for the Raiders’ 1980 Super Bowl champion team, won a House seat from Utah as a Republican. Anthony Gonzalez, who caught passes from Peyton Manning in Indianapolis, won a House seat from Ohio as a Republican. Sharice Davids, who twice fought professionally in a mixed martial arts octagon, in 2020 won her second term as a Democrat representing Kansas’s third congressional district.

But Walker doesn’t measure up to the seriousness they displayed for the offices they sought. Last month, Walker appeared on a Fox News show and demonstrated all but complete incoherence while trying to repeat the talking points of the party that has adopted him like a pet. He failed to show up for a debate three weeks ago against the other Republican hopefuls for Warnock’s seat, and then repeated that dodge this week.

In contrast, Colin Allred, a Democrat and one-time NFL linebacker before hitting law school (from which he graduated), not only demanded a televised debate in 2018 with longtime Texas Republican congressman Pete Sessions, he got it — and impressed voters so much he defeated Sessions in the aftermath.

Walker hasn’t even voted more than once in the past two decades. He was a resident of Texas until tapped by the GOP to run against Warnock. The Associated Press reported Walker’s ex-wife secured a protective order against him in 2005 and cited “physically abusive and extremely threatening behavior” in her filing for divorce. In his 2008 memoir “Breaking Free,” Walker admitted to violent episodes, including hunting for a man in Dallas who he said was reneging on a business deal, and playing Russian roulette.

But none of that history, new or old, has stopped Walker from leading most primary polls or from being given a toss-up chance to defeat Warnock. How? There is no other explanation: Walker is a former star from the field of athletics. What he doesn’t know, and how he’s behaved, matters not.

Sadly, it is not surprising. Former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville, with no political experience but a winning record against in-state rival Alabama and Trump’s backing, two years ago defeated Democratic Sen. Doug Jones to represent Alabama in the Senate. He did so without debating and largely avoiding public questioning as well. Shortly after he was elected, Tuberville misidentified the three branches of government, said World War II was fought to liberate Europe from socialism and communism and fanned the flames of the lie engulfing democracy that Trump won the 2020 election.

I don’t know if Walker knows government is divided between the legislative, executive and judicial branches, or if he understands the reason the Second World War was fought. But he, too, questioned the legitimacy of the last presidential election despite no evidence to do so. It wasn’t until just the other day that he changed his tune, albeit slightly.

“I don’t know if there were problems with the 2020 election,” Walker said on a radio talk show. “What I do know is that, right now, I’m gonna win this seat, and, you know, everyone has complained, even Stacey Abrams complained that her race wasn’t fair. And I’ve heard a lot of people saying a lot of things. One thing that I gotta worry about right now, that I’m gonna have a fair election, that people can believe in our election when I run.”

The viability of Walker’s candidacy is insulting. To Black voters, if it’s assumed they would vote for Walker merely because he was an exceptional Black athlete. And to sports fans, if it’s assumed they would vote for Walker merely because he was an exceptional athlete, one of the greatest. Because he is a three-time all-American. Because he scored 61 touchdowns and gained 7,115 yards in three seasons in the short-lived USFL, where he played for the Trump-owned New Jersey Generals. Because he scored 82 TDs on 8,225 rushing yards and 4,859 receiving yards in a dozen NFL seasons.

Walker should be in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. But that shouldn’t make him, or anyone, a legitimate candidate for elected office. His unearned political candidacy threatens calamitous consequences.

 

[Cartmann99]

 

[47of74]

3 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

 

Yeah I saw that too. That needs to be every third democratic campaign ad from now through November all over this country. 

[Cartmann99]

Christian Walker is back to share more of his "wisdom" with us:

 

[Cartmann99]

 

[Cartmann99]

Arizona GOP Senate candidate wants to allow states to ban contraception use

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After the U.S. Supreme Court overturns women’s constitutional right to abortion this summer, one Arizona Republican candidate for U.S. Senate thinks judges should also take aim at the right to buy and use contraception.

Blake Masters, a Tucson-based venture capitalist, boasts on his website that he will only vote to confirm federal judges “who understand that Roe and Griswold and Casey were wrongly decided, and that there is no constitutional right to abortion.” Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, decided in 1973 and 1992, respectively, both upheld a constitutional right to abortion access.

But the ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 protected a married couple’s right to buy and use contraceptives without government restrictions. The case centered on a Connecticut law that banned the use of contraceptives, which the court determined violated a married couple’s constitutional right to privacy, establishing the basis for the right to privacy with respect to intimate practices.

Masters’ stance puts him on the opposite side of the issue from the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the campaign arm of GOP senators, which has advised candidates on talking points following the leak of a draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.

In a section instructing candidates on how to “forcefully refute Democrat lies” about Republicans’ positions on abortion and health care, the NRSC declares that “Republicans DO NOT want to take away contraception.”

Elsewhere in the talking points memo to GOP Senate candidates, the NRSC advises them to say, “I’m not in favor of putting women or doctors in jail. I would never take away anyone’s contraception or health care. That’s just the typical BS you get from politicians.”

Masters’ campaign could not immediately be reached for comment.

The Supreme Court in June will issue its ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case centered on a Mississippi abortion law that is a vehicle for the court to overturn Roe, as conservative justices appear poised to do in a draft opinion that was leaked.

In an election year that is supposed to favor Republicans across the country, Democrats and reproductive rights activists are concerned about what a Republican-controlled Senate chamber could mean, not just for abortion rights but a host of other issues.

In Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion, he mentioned other landmark cases that could potentially be overturned in the future, Including Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage.

President Donald Trump hasn’t yet endorsed an Arizona Senate candidate, but Masters is viewed as the favorite to receive his endorsement. His campaign is also being supported by his former boss and mentor, technology investor Peter Thiel, who is spending at least $10 million to bankroll a campaign to support Masters. Masters has already won the support of some extremist Republicans, most recently Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who spoke to a white nationalist conference earlier this year. Other media reports have noted his past praise for the Unabomber and Hermann Goering, one Hitler’s top military leaders and one of the most prominent members of the Nazi Party.

It’s unclear where the NRSC stands on all Republican candidates in Arizona, but Florida Sen. Rick Scott – who leads the group – was trying hard to convince term-limited Gov. Doug Ducey to jump into the race on several occasions, signaling possible disinterest in the field.

If the NRSC is serious that “Republicans will not take away contraception,” it might cause a slight hiccup in Masters’ candidacy should he win in the Aug. 2 primary.

 

[47of74]

And that's not concerning, nuclear regulatory commission?

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J.R. Majewski, the Air Force veteran who won the GOP primary for Ohio's new 9th Congressional District, was a January 6 rally participant and has repeatedly shared pro-QAnon material -- including a video showing him painting his lawn to say Trump 2020 with "Q" replacing the zeros.

Majewski emerged victorious in Tuesday's crowded Republican primary and will face off against long-serving Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur in the newly drawn district this November.

Before running for Congress, Majewski was best known as the Trump supporter who painted his front lawn into a 19,000-square-foot Trump 2020 sign. He later appeared in the MAGA rapper Forgiato Blow's song "Let's Go Brandon Save America," by rapping one verse decrying "woke" politics after he launched his campaign.

Majewski was deployed in the Middle East in the early 2000s during Operation Enduring Freedom, according to his campaign website. He currently works in the nuclear energy industry.