General Political Fúckery Thread: Elon Musk blows up stopgap spending bill, Government Shutdown looming on 12/21/24

[ADevilYouKhow]

5 former officers charged with federal civil rights violations in Tyre Nichols beating death

Five former Memphis police officers have been charged with federal civil rights violations in the beating death of Tyre Nichols.

apnews.com

Thoughts?

 

[KFBF]

Corny.

 

[ADevilYouKhow]

Poverty Rate Soared in 2022 as Aid Ended and Prices Rose

The increase in poverty reversed two years of large declines. Median income, adjusted for inflation, fell 2.3 percent to $74,580.

www.nytimes.com

Maybe Republicans controlling the house is a bad thing

 

[ADevilYouKhow]

US sets new record for billion-dollar climate disasters in single year

Country has experienced 23 extreme weather events costing $1bn or more already this year, passing previous mark of 22 in 2020

www.theguardian.com

Maybe we should be more proactive

 

[ADevilYouKhow]

Colossal Cache of Lithium Found in US May Be World's Largest

An area known as Thacker Pass on the Nevada-Oregon border is home to clay that contain tens of millions of tons of lithium.

futurism.com

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

 

[ADevilYouKhow]

U.A.W. Prepares for Partial Strike Against Detroit Automakers on Friday

The union’s president, Shawn Fain, said negotiators were nowhere near an agreement and ruled out a contract extension while talks continued.

www.nytimes.com

 

[Reality Check]

Looks like we're getting Mitt "no fukks given" Romney from now until January 2025.

 

[88m3]

As Cases Soar, ‘Dementia Villages’ Look Like the Future of Home Care

A new generation of treatment facilities is aiming to integrate dementia patients with the communities around them, blurring lines between home and hospital.

www.nytimes.com

 

[MAKAVELI25]

Looks like we're getting Mitt "no fukks given" Romney from now until January 2025.

I think Whoadie voted to remove Trump in both impeachment trials.

Romney has wanted ALL the smoke for years

 

[the next guy]

As Abortion Laws Drive Obstetricians From Red States, Maternity Care Suffers (Published 2023)

Some doctors who handle high-risk pregnancies are fleeing restrictive abortion laws. Idaho has been particularly hard hit.

www.nytimes.com

@the next guy

Freedom for everyone (SIKE! just white men)

 

[Worthless Loser]

Romney leaving the Senate is not a good thing. He is one of the few rational Republicans left and a major player in bi-partisan legislation getting passed during Biden's first two years. Whoever gets elected in 2024 will likely be much worse than him. Unless that Evan McMullin guy that lost to Mike Lee in 2022 can win the primary.

 

[DrBanneker]

You should all read the Atlantic article pushing his upcoming biography (the author is an Atlantic reporter). I'll quote some of the wildest stuff below

What Mitt Romney Saw in the Senate

In an exclusive excerpt from my biography of the senator, Romney: A Reckoning, he reveals what drove him to retire.

www.theatlantic.com

On Hawley and Cruz


On J.D. Vance



MAGA literally has GOP senators shook for their lives and families since Jan 6th

 

[DrBanneker]

Copying my response from the TLR Romney thread...

You should all read the Atlantic article pushing his upcoming biography (the author is an Atlantic reporter). I'll quote some of the wildest stuff below

What Mitt Romney Saw in the Senate

In an exclusive excerpt from my biography of the senator, Romney: A Reckoning, he reveals what drove him to retire.

www.theatlantic.com

“A very large portion of my party,” he told me one day, “really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.” He’d realized this only recently, he said. We were a few months removed from an attempted coup instigated by Republican leaders, and he was wrestling with some difficult questions. Was the authoritarian element of the GOP a product of President Trump, or had it always been there, just waiting to be activated by a sufficiently shameless demagogue? And what role had the members of the mainstream establishment—people like him, the reasonable Republicans—played in allowing the rot on the right to fester?

Perhaps Romney’s most surprising discovery upon entering the Senate was that his disgust with Trump was not unique among his Republican colleagues. “Almost without exception,” he told me, “they shared my view of the president.” In public, of course, they played their parts as Trump loyalists, often contorting themselves rhetorically to defend the president’s most indefensible behavior. But in private, they ridiculed his ignorance, rolled their eyes at his antics, and made incisive observations about his warped, toddlerlike psyche. Romney recalled one senior Republican senator frankly admitting, “He has none of the qualities you would want in a president, and all of the qualities you wouldn’t.”

One afternoon in March 2019, Trump paid a visit to the Senate Republicans’ weekly caucus lunch. He was in a buoyant mood—two days earlier, the Justice Department had announced that the much-anticipated report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller failed to establish collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. As Romney later wrote in his journal, the president was met with a standing ovation fit for a conquering hero, and then launched into some rambling remarks. He talked about the so-called Russia hoax and relitigated the recent midterm elections and swung wildly from one tangent to another. He declared, somewhat implausibly, that the GOP would soon become “the party of health care.” The senators were respectful and attentive.

As soon as Trump left, Romney recalled, the Republican caucus burst into laughter.

On Hawley and Cruz

What bothered Romney most about Hawley and his cohort was the oily disingenuousness. “They know better!” he told me. “Josh Hawley is one of the smartest people in the Senate, if not the smartest, and Ted Cruz could give him a run for his money.” They were too smart, Romney believed, to actually think that Trump had won the 2020 election. Hawley and Cruz “were making a calculation,” Romney told me, “that put politics above the interests of liberal democracy and the Constitution.”

On J.D. Vance

Vance, who grew up in a poor, dysfunctional family in Appalachia and went on to graduate from Yale Law School, had seemed bright and thoughtful, with interesting ideas about how Republicans could court the white working class without indulging in toxic Trumpism. Then, in 2021, Vance decided he wanted to run for Senate, and reinvented his entire persona overnight. Suddenly, he was railing against the “childless left” and denouncing Indigenous Peoples’ Day as a “fake holiday” and accusing Joe Biden of manufacturing the opioid crisis “to punish people who didn’t vote for him.” The speed of the MAGA makeover was jarring.

“I do wonder, how do you make that decision?” Romney mused to me as Vance was degrading himself on the campaign trail that summer. “How can you go over a line so stark as that—and for what?” Romney wished he could grab Vance by the shoulders and scream: This is not worth it! “It’s not like you’re going to be famous and powerful because you became a United States senator. It’s like, really? You sell yourself so cheap?” The prospect of having Vance in the caucus made Romney uncomfortable. “How do you sit next to him at lunch?”

MAGA literally has GOP senators shook for their lives and families since Jan 6th

Later, during the Senate trial, Romney heard the same calculation while talking with a small group of Republican colleagues. When one senator, a member of leadership, said he was leaning toward voting to convict, the others urged him to reconsider. You can’t do that, Romney recalled someone saying. Think of your personal safety, said another. Think of your children. The senator eventually decided they were right.

As dismayed as Romney was by this line of thinking, he understood it. Most members of Congress don’t have security details. Their addresses are publicly available online. Romney himself had been shelling out $5,000 a day since the riot to cover private security for his family—an expense he knew most of his colleagues couldn’t afford.

 

[Worthless Loser]