Month: April 2021

I think Ron Johnson speaks for the 25% of the Republican Party that has completely lost its grip on reality. That’s a lot of people.

In an interview with conservative Wisconsin radio host Vicki McKenna, herself a vocal coronavirus vaccine skeptic, Johnson launched into a condemnation of “vaccine passports,” a credential that would allow businesses to verify vaccination status.

But Johnson also went a step further, declaring he sees “no reason to be pushing vaccines on people,” arguing their distribution should be “limited” to those most vulnerable to coronavirus, and asking, “if you have a vaccine, quite honestly, what do you care if your neighbor has one or not?”

Johnson said he is “getting highly suspicious” of the “big push to make sure everybody gets the vaccine,” stating it’s “not a fully approved vaccine” but also arguing that the fact it is 95% effective means only a limited number of people need to be vaccinated.

The comments put Johnson at odds with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who spent much of the last Senate recess urging Republican men to get vaccinated amid public opinion polling that shows they are the least likely to do so.

Johnson is one of the Senate’s most prolific promoters of coronavirus pseudoscience, holding hearings last year as the chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to promote unproven treatments like Hydroxychloroquine.

32%. That’s the share of residents in Carbon County, Wyoming, which voted for former President Donald Trump by a 53-point margin in 2020, who are vaccine hesitant, according to an estimate from the Centers for Disease Control. That’s compared to just a 7% hesitancy rate in San Francisco County, California, which went for President Joe Biden by 73 points.

I called Ron Johnson the dumbest man in the Senate long before this Trumpian nonsense. And, by the way, even if he decides not to run, Mo Brooks and Tommy Tuberville and God knows how many other Trumpish fools will take his place. The GOP Senate has become a cesspool of morons.

If there’s a state that could easily elect a trans woman reality star as governor, it would be California. We have certainly elected celebrities before and we have a socially liberal society that would hardly be hostile to a transgender candidate. The problem for Caitlyn Jenner is that in California today, we just don’t elect Republicans to high office.

Mainly this is a grift for out-of-work Trump operatives who think this is oh-so-clever because liberal Californians will all vote for the Republican trans woman because our “woke” cult will expel us if we don’t. They really don’t get it.

The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, gay, ex-GOP consultant and Oakland resident did the best analysis of this silly notion:

As The Bulwark’s California correspondent, I wanted to weigh in on the proto-candidacy of Caitlyn Jenner for my state’s governorship, an idea that has been floated aggressively by the political press over last week. 

Let me cut to the chase: Any person who supported Donald Trump has failed the entry-level test of political viability for statewide office in California. End of story. 

I had some folks push back on this notion on Twitter, citing The Governator’s recall victory in 2003. This might make sense from afar, but doesn’t take into account the changes which have happened in American politics over the last 20 years.

The same demographic changes in the country and the suburban shift towards Democrats that helped the party improve in places like Atlanta are also operative in San Diego, Los Angeles, Sacramento, and even the Bay Area. 

Let me lay out some numbers for you to demonstrate how different of a world we are in today from that of 2003. 

In the two presidential races bookending the 2003 recall, George W. Bush lost California by 1.3 million and 1.2 million votes respectively. Not exactly close. 

But get this: 

Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by 5.1 million votes. 

For a sense of scale here, the gap between Biden and Trump was greater than the entire raw vote total Bush got in California in 2000. 

And it’s not just Trump. Gavin Newsom won his race by 3 million votes and just under 24 percentage points in 2018. Back in 2002 Gray Davis won his race by just 400,000 votes and 5 percentage points. 

Not all blue states are the same. California in 2003 may have been one of the nation’s bright-blue bastions, but now it is the deepest of indigos.

Someday the political status quo will be disrupted in the Golden State—politics is always in motion. But if somebody tells you the disrupter is  going to be a red-hatted reality-show star (or an obnoxious internet troll turned interim director of national intelligence) well, tell them you’d like some of whatever it is they bought at our local dispensary. 

Do we know for a fact that Jenner isn’t going to film this campaign as a reality show? It’s actually a pretty good idea … for TV.

Lance Manion died unexpectedly this week. To those of us who came up in the early blogosphere, he was one of the Original Gangsters. I was struggling to write a proper tribute when I came across this from his friend Tom Watson and realized he’d said it all:

April 22, 2021
A Blogger’s Farewell

By Tom Watson

The great Lance Mannion has left us and his passing requires a testament to his gifts and generosity in a venue appropriate to his prolific blogging life. This particular slab of granite will be carved here, upon this ancient turf, this feed, this blog, this Typepad. For this is where Lance lived and created his world of words, where he sowed such a rich wildflower meadow of scents and colors and shapes and stories. His work was a gift to me and so many thousands of others, very lightly remunerated, and yet so consistent that we took yet another wordsmith spring for granted and the sudden killing frost of mortality has wiped the blooms away. There will be no more posts. No more musings on literature and film, television and media, politics and culture.

It was here where Lance Mannion joined the immortals of our game. He ranks with Steve Gilliard, Gehrig’s “luckiest man” to that Ruthian loss and – in my view – the Iron Horse of the liberal blogging era, a man who kept going long after all the RSS feeds dried up and Twitter injected its instantaneous meanness of spirit into what now passes for discourse. Those gauzy days of the aughts seem distant now, but they were a time of superheroes – writers who wore their disguises like marvelous capes and masks and costumes. I shudder at their remembered majesty and might. “Lance Mannion” invented himself, because he could. Because we all could. Lance was part Bing Crosby part Jack Lemmon and part Damon Runyon. But he also injected hardcore liberalism into middle American tastebuds, like Peter Parker’s radioactive spider. Tolerance crossed with curiosity was his superpower. And so he rambled with the Self-Styled Siren, with the Viscount LaCarte, with Neddie Jingo, with Blue Girl, with Shakespeare’s Sister, with M.A. Peel, with Jon Swift, with Majikthise, with Digby, and all the other crazy superhero bastards (including those of us foolish enough to use our real names). Keep your Rat Pack, brother, that was my crowd.

Lance Mannion was the witty guy down at the end of the best bar in town. You walked into the joint happy to see him there every damned night. You left with his jocular Fred MacMurray banter ringing in your ears, smoother than the most expensive Scotch.

Dave Reilly had a harder road.

Lance was my muse, but Dave was my friend. He was a brilliant writer, out of the Iowa Writers Workshop, and a devoted family man who hit some very tough times in late middle life. We went to the Clinton Global Initiative together. We hung around a few Democratic victory parties together. He joined my newcritics blogging venture back in the day. He was a regular at the Hillman Prizes. We marched with the Teamsters at Occupy Wall Street. And then harder times closed in. He had some serious health challenges. And his wife Adrienne – herself a brilliant journalist the very reason why Lance Mannion lionized Lois Lane – became ill. To blog readers, she’s the Blonde or Mrs. M. They were an incredibly close couple, and they loved their boys deeply and publicly. But in this time in this country for a blogger and a newspaperwoman, the economic bar was high even without the healthcare crisis.

Dave would always send a Christmas card. Now and again a postcard. My favorite – as he knew – was the one from Hyde Park, after a visit to FDR’s Presidential library, a place we both revered. He was a very thoughtful man; I was not always as thoughtful in return. Money was tight. The blog raised a bit, but perhaps not enough. The cracks through which a guy like Dave can fall in our society are too damned wide.

If you read the Lance Mannion blog – and by God, it should be preserved – I recommend the posts about his family. He created “Mannionville” and populated it with people. Pop M. The Blonde. Mom Mannion. His boys, Ken and Oliver Mannion. The barista at Barnes & Noble. The guy at the hardware store. A world where people knew each other and cared. That’s where Dave and Lance came together, the place where the blogging superhero took off his mask. They were the same. A loving father, husband, and son. I suspect that’s how he will be remembered the best.

But to me, he’ll always wear a cape.

NOTE: Dave’s family needs your help. Please consider making a financial donation to help them out at this difficult time via this online fundraiser organized by Susie Madrak. 

My best friend’s dad when I was in high school repaired military aircraft in WWII. He spent the rest of his life reparing cars. His proudest moment from the war was the time he worked on Gen. Eisenhower’s plane. He was a simple man. That did not mean he was not damned good at his job.

“Low skill” is tossed around casually, Annie Lowry writes in The Atlantic, having marveled at a prep cook she recently observed. Policy wonks use “low skill” to describe underappreciated and underpaid workers and a U.S. “skills gap” that needs fixing:

Those are ubiquitous arguments in elite policy conversations. They are also deeply problematic. The issue is in part semantic: The term low-skill as we use it is often derogatory, a socially sanctioned slur Davos types casually lob at millions of American workers, disproportionately Black and Latino, immigrant, and low-income workers. Describing American workers as low-skill also vaults over the discrimination that creates these “low-skill” jobs and pushes certain workers to them. And it positions American workers as being the problem, rather than American labor standards, racism and sexism, and social and educational infrastructure. It is a cancerous little phrase, low-skill. As the pandemic ends and the economy reopens, we need to leave it behind.

The general policy prescription, however, is that we need to leave “low-skill workers” behind. Forget about being essential! These are the millions of Americans without the credentials and chops to succeed in tomorrow’s economy, any number of white papers, panels, and conference colloquiums will tell you. Indeed, the Obama White House, as part of its Upskill Initiative, posited that roughly 20 percent of American workers need to address their on-the-job “deficiencies” to “realize their full potential,” fretting that 36 million people “cannot compare and contrast information or integrate multiple pieces of information,” per one test.

This description, like so many descriptions of “low-skill workers,” is abjectly offensive, both patronizing and demeaning. Imagine going up to a person who’s stocking shelves in a grocery store and telling him that he is low-skill and holding the economy back. Imagine seeing a group of nannies and blasting “Learn to code!” at them as life advice. The low-skill label flattens workers to a single attribute, ignoring the capacities they have and devaluing the work they do. It pathologizes them, portraying low-skill workers as a problem to be fixed, My Fair Lady–style.

What’s worse, Lowry explains, is how loosey-goosey a “low-skill job” is, often lumped together with entry-level jobs.

Low-skill need not mean little education. Another friend emigrated here from Brazil where she was a dentist. Getting certified in the U.S., however, was too much of a hassle. Multiligual, she got by as a Spanish teacher, translator, and dance instructor. When I walked into the tech school here to get my first COVID shot, she recognized me behind my mask before I did her. She was doing intake for patient arrivals.

Next time you enjoy radishes in your salad, remember the farmworkers like these Oxnard workers, who harvest the food that we eat. #WeFeedYou #Calor #Ovetime4FarmWorkers pic.twitter.com/mjICn0nnta

— United Farm Workers (@UFWupdates) September 9, 2018

Lowry continues:

The most gutting problem with these terms is that many “low-skill jobs” held by “low-skill workers” are anything but. Many of these are difficult, physically and emotionally taxing jobs that, in fact, require employees to develop extraordinary skills, if not ones you learn at medical school or MIT. A great deal of skill is necessary to wash a lunch rush’s worth of dishes. A great deal of skill is required to change the clothes of an immobilized senior who might not want to have her clothes changed, or to wrangle a class of toddlers, or to clean up an overgrown yard at breakneck pace, or to handle five tables of drunk guys who want their wings yesterday. The kind of patience and equanimity it takes to be a good care worker? Not a skill, apparently. The kind of fortitude it takes to be a fruit picker? Not a skill either.

Who are we if our policy language demeans those skills and those workers? We are ourselves, I suppose, which is to say that the low-skill label is a social construct that at least in part reflects the structural racism and sexism endemic in our economy. We understand jobs to be low-skill because of the kinds of people who hold those jobs; we see certain skills as valuable because of the kinds of people asked to use those skills; we ignore other skills because of the kinds of people asked to use those skills; and we shunt workers into “low-skill” jobs due to circumstances out of their control.

Neither are jobs or their remuneration reflections of intelligence, although we treat them that way. Donald Trump is a “billionaire” and a moron. A former engineer, I’ve worked with PEs who were useless andf Ph.D.s who were clueless.

“The point,” Lowry wtrites, “is that we scarcely stop to recognize how our biases inform our understanding of what skilled work is and whose work matters.” Woman joining a “man’s” profession lowers its prestige and pay. It is similar with Black workers, studies suggest. “The same dynamics are surely at play in how we distinguish between low-skill, low-pay and high-skill, high-pay work.” It is a kind of caste system.

In Tom Clancy’s “Debt of Honor,” Jack Ryan asks his Secret Service bodyguard a question.

 “Paul, you think you’re smart?” Jack asked. The question took the Secret Service man aback a little.
 “Yeah, I do. So?”
 “So why do you suppose that anybody else is smarter than you are? They’re not, Paul,” Ryan went on.

They just have different jobs . Jobs that pay better.

“At stake is something I never expected to worry about in the United States: the integrity of the vote count,” Rick Hasen begins in his offering this morning at the New York Times. The professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine is not just talking about reciminations against Georgia’s secretary of state, Republican Brad Raffensperger, or Michigan’s state canvassing board member, Republican Aaron Van Langevelde, both of whom chose following the law over manipulating it for Donald Trump in 2020:

Republican state legislatures have also passed or are considering laws aimed at stripping Democratic counties of the power to run fair elections. The new Georgia law gives the legislature the power to handpick an election official who could vote on the state election board for a temporary takeover of up to four county election boards during the crucial period of administering an election and counting votes. That provision appears to be aimed at Democratic counties like Fulton County that have increased voter access. A new Iowa law threatens criminal penalties against local election officials who enact emergency election rules and bars them from sending voters unsolicited absentee ballot applications.

A Texas bill would similarly stymie future efforts like the one in Harris County to expand access to the ballot and give challengers at the polls the ability not only to observe but to interfere with polling place procedures meant to ensure election integrity. According to a new report by Protect Democracy, Republican legislators have proposed at least 148 bills in 36 states that could increase the chances of cooking the electoral books.

State legislatures and others also have been taking steps to amplify false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, solidifying the false belief among a majority of Republican voters that the November vote count was unfair. It’s not just the hearings featuring charlatans like Rudy Giuliani or Sidney Powell spewing the big lie. It’s also steps like the Arizona State Senate demanding the seizure of November ballots from Democratic-leaning Maricopa County, and ordering an audit of the votes to be conducted by a proponent of the bogus “Stop the Steal” movement who falsely contended that the election was rigged against Mr. Trump. Never mind that Arizona’s vote count has been repeatedly subject to examination by courts and election officials with no irregularities found.

Trump himself launched such a commission. Headed by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R), the voting integrity commission “uncovered no evidence to support claims of widespread voter fraud” when it disbanded in 2018. Kobach’s Interstate Crosscheck program is itself all but disbanded. The thinly veiled effort to substantiate the myth of widespread voter fraud under the guise of voter list maintence is the subject of a class-action lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas.

The vote-counting process is more arcane and harder to explain to the public than prohibiting giving water to voters in line at polling places, Hasen warns. He recommeds every jusistiction use tangible paper ballots rather than electronic records. H.R. 1 contains that requirement for federal elections.

Hasen also suggests several other ways attempts to subvert the process might be thwarted. But we might not know until January 2025 if enough has been done.

“It may begin with lawsuits against new voter-suppression laws and nascent efforts to enshrine the right to vote in the Constitution,” Hasen concludes. “But it is also going to require a cross-partisan alliance of those committed to the rule of law — in and out of government — to ensure that our elections continue to reflect the will of the people.”

Even tougher when one of the country’s major political parties is committed to neither the rule of law nor to rule by a majority of the American people.

This is sweet. They just want to be near him:

Fox News host and right-wing hanger-on Sean Hannity shelled out $5.3 million for a beachfront house on the south end of Palm Beach—less than three miles from Mar-a-Lago, property records show.

The buy makes Hannity the latest in a long line of conservative media figures to set up shop in the wealthy south Florida town, sometimes called Billionaire’s Row. After Joe Biden’s inauguration in January, Donald Trump moved there to his 17-acre estate with three bomb shelters and a 20,000-square-foot ballroom coated in gold leaf. Ann Coulter and recently deceased Rush Limbaugh called the place home for years. Roger Ailes died at an Ocean Lane mansion in 2017, after moving to town following his Fox settlement the year prior. Borat star Rudy Giuliani has a condo nearby.

Hannity made the purchase, first reported by the Palm Beach Post, on April 15, according to the deed finalized by the county clerk’s office on Tuesday—just one month after the sellers bought it themselves. Recycled-clothes manufacturer Camilo Raful and jeweler Patricia Robalino first snagged the place on March 19 for $4.2 million, a 20 percent discount on what Hannity paid. The couple still owns a neighboring house, according to the Post.

The three-bedroom townhouse sits at “The Residences at Sloans Curve,” a gated enclave where six of the “cheap” houses start at $2.5 million, and 17 tonier ones—several thousand square feet each, “all with private pools”—kick off at $4 million.

Built in 1981, the Sloans Curve development maintains a 24-hour staff stationed in gatehouses across the compound, a selection of community pools (in addition to the private ones), a gym, six tennis courts, and what the Post described as a “party room.”

Hannity’s model spans about 5,086-square-feet of living space, with 4.5 bathrooms, a two-car garage, “a very large living room,” and a “huge master bedroom facing the ocean with fireplace, large balcony, his & hers bathrooms, and large closets,” according to Zillow.

The house sits directly south of property owned by casino billionaire Steve Wynn, the former Republican National Committee finance chairman and owner of Vegas staples like the Golden Nugget and the Bellagio.

Hannity is a prolific house-buyer—a 2018 report from The Guardian linked the pundit to shell companies that have paid some $90 million on over 870 homes across seven states. According to the story, those homes ranged from “luxurious mansions to rentals for low-income families.”

Unlike many of those shell companies, Hannity owns the Palm Beach pad under his own name but lists a wealth-management firm in Georgia as his mailing address.

Working class heroes, all of them.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX): "You didn't see Republicans when we had control of the Senate try to rig the game. You didn't see us try to pack the court." pic.twitter.com/reUU9WJU1d

— The Recount (@therecount) April 22, 2021

Shamelessness isn’t adequate to describe them anymore. I honestly don’t have the words.

The “don’t give a damn how it looks” radicalism in the GOP these days is overwhelming. Check out what they’re doing in Arizona:

When a Republican-led coalition gathers to “audit” Maricopa County, Arizona’s 2020 election results on Thursday, the motley crew will include a former lawmaker who previously lost a police job for lying about a stolen iPad and a technology firm helmed by a proponent of election conspiracy theories.

Joe Biden won the presidential election in Arizona, including in hotly contested Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix. Although multiple bipartisan reviews have upheld those results, and Donald Trump has long since exited the White House, a new effort to recount all of Maricopa County’s 2.1 million votes is kicking off this week. The scheme is led by actual elected officials with power, including the leaders of Arizona’s state Senate, which has tapped a Florida-based cybersecurity firm to oversee the audit.

But from kooky fundraisers to a conspiracy-minded tech CEO to an auditor who lost the very 2020 election he’s auditing, the recount has eyeballs rolling.

On Monday, former Arizona state representative Anthony Kern tweeted that he would be involved in the recount. “#Electionintegrity,” he wrote in his announcement. Arizona’s House Democrats had a less sunny response: quote-tweeting Kern with a picture of him standing in a crowd of Trump fans at a Jan. 6 rally that preceded the attack on the U.S. Capitol. “One of Arizona’s election auditors reporting for duty,” the House Democrats tweeted. “#ShamAudit.”

Kern, who did not return The Daily Beast’s request for comment, maintains that he did not enter the Capitol or participate in the riot, and has not been charged with a crime related to the day’s events. Still, the specifics of his actions are the subject of a legal spat in Arizona. On the day of the riot, he was serving his final days as a state representative, having lost re-election the same day as Trump. He and another Arizona representative who attended the pre-riot rally have declined public records requests for their messages related to the event, with their lawyer stating that “the threat of criminal prosecution gives rise to certain Constitutional rights that may overcome the duty to disclose otherwise public documents under Arizona’s public records law.”

The two Republicans have also filed a defamation lawsuit against an Arizona lawmaker who signed a letter asking the FBI to investigate their Jan. 6 activities.

This isn’t Kern’s first time facing legal scrutiny. Prior to becoming a lawmaker, he worked as a code enforcement officer for the El Mirage Police Department. In 2014, he was fired for misleading his supervisor about a computer tablet that went missing, the Phoenix New Times revealed in 2019. As part of his termination, he was placed on the state’s Brady list, a compendium of law enforcement officers with known credibility issues. (In fact, as the New Times noted, even Kerr’s claims to being law enforcement were dubious: He was a civilian officer throughout his employment, and though he represented himself as holding a “law enforcement” certification in financial disclosures in 2014, 2015, and 2016, he did not receive peace officer certification until 2017.)

In 2019, while serving in the Arizona House, Kern helped push a bill that would make it easier for people like himself to remove their names from the state Brady list. Colleagues told the New Times they had not been aware that Kern was on the list. The bill did not pass, but a similar one is currently being debated.

Arizona Democrats called Kerr’s participation in Thursday’s audit inappropriate. Rep. Athena Salman, a Democratic member of the state House’s Government and Elections Committee, noted that Kern was also in D.C. in January in his capacity as a Trump elector. (Kern promoted a bogus theory that “dual electors” could throw the election to Trump.)This is one of the guys that they bring in and say, “That’s who we need looking at these ballots and determining whether or not these are quality votes”?

[…]

But Kern is far from the only controversial figure involved in the audit. The recount is being led by a business called Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based cybersecurity company led by Doug Logan.

Following Trump’s defeat in November, Logan became a prominent Twitter voice casting doubt on the election results via multiple debunked conspiracy theories. An Arizona Republic report found that Logan frequently retweeted Sidney Powell, the former Trump campaign lawyer whose theories about election fraud were so outlandish that, when Powell was sued for defamation, she argued in court that no reasonable person could have taken her seriously.

Logan’s Twitter involvement with pro-Trump fringes went even further. Archived tweets from Logan’s now-deleted account reveal that he frequently tweeted at Ron Watkins, the former administrator of the site 8kun. Watkins is a vocal proponent of election fraud claims and in a recent documentary appeared to accidentally admit that he was “Q,” the author of the lurid QAnon conspiracy theory. (Watkins now denies that he is Q.)

“I’d love to chat if you have a chance,” Logan tweeted at Watkins on Nov. 12. The following day, he tweeted at Watkins after tweeting about hacking voting machines. “If you have any ‘original source’ documents you’re basing your info off of, I’d love it if you shared the links ;-),” Logan tweeted. Later that day, he tweeted at Watkins with “source material” on voting machines.

In December, in a reply to a now-deleted thread from Powell and her colleague Lin Wood, Logan tagged Watkins again. “Haven’t you been working on this?” Logan asked him.

Elsewhere, Logan quote-tweeted Wood to promote a hoax about voting machines supposedly being seized in Germany, which would somehow prove Trump to have won the election.

[…]

Of course, the audit’s very existence is a victory for Arizona Senate Republicans, who spent months embroiled in court cases and logistical battles over how such a recount would take place.

Although the Republican-led Maricopa County Board of Supervisors did turn over voting data that upheld Biden’s victory in a previous review, the group argued against turning over the county’s 2.1 million physical ballots, citing rules on voter privacy. Then, in February, the Arizona Senate won a court ruling enabling them to examine the ballots by hand.

Their next challenge was figuring out how to conduct the audit. Initially, Senate President Karen Fann tapped the “Allied Security Operations Group” to head up the recount, but backtracked after critics noted that that group was pro-Trump and had made false claims about voter fraud in Michigan. After the partnership crumbled, a colorful assortment of Trump supporters, including MyPillow founder Mike Lindell and supposed Satanism expert Lyle Rapacki, stepped in to promote the audit, The Daily Beast previously reported.

Soon thereafter, a group called “Voices and Votes” took up the cause of fundraising for the audit. That group was led by One America News host Christina Bobb, who had promoted voter fraud conspiracy theories, TPM reported. Wood told the outlet that his foundation had chipped in $50,000 to the cause.

Ultimately the audit’s outcome is irrelevant. Multiple bipartisan reviews have upheld the state’s election results and Biden’s Arizona victory has already been certified in the state, in a process that involved the state’s governor, secretary of state, and state Supreme Court chief justice—all of them Republicans. Also: Biden is president and not going anywhere.

But what remains is a worrying precedent, Salman said.

“They can’t de-certify the election results for 2020,” she said. “I wholeheartedly believe that they’re testing the boundaries to see whatever they can get away with, so that they can do this whole performance again, and manufacture the results that they want coming into the 2022 election cycle.”

Of course. And they also want to fluff their Dear Leader Donald Trump by “validating” his Bie Lie. Maybe he’ll invited them to Mar-a-lago for selfie and a diet coke.

I know this will shock you but it looks as though the Republicans are hypocrites:

The White House on Thursday signaled little appetite for Senate Republicans’ early insistence that Congress should couple an increase in the country’s debt ceiling with corresponding spending cuts, hoping to ward off a major political showdown entering the summer.

A White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said President Biden “fully expects that Congress will meet its obligations as it did on a bipartisan basis three times during the Trump Administration and amend the debt limit law as needed.”

The early warning comes a day after Senate Republicans gathered to adopt their conference’s guiding rules for this session of Congress. Unanimously, the GOP members agreed to a non-binding yet symbolic statement that they would not raise the debt ceiling unless lawmakers also cut slashed by a similar amount or made other structural changes to government programs.

Senate Republicans agreed to stake the position at the request of Sen. Rick Scott (Fla.), who regularly has joined other Republicans in blasting Biden and his Democratic allies for seeking major spending increases, including as part of $2 trillion infrastructure reform plan.

[…]

Under Trump, Republican lawmakers did not demand spending cuts as they raised the debt ceiling several times, even as the former president shelled out massive sums to fund his priorities, including the military. But the GOP historically has sought to use the debt as leverage in political fights against Democrats, at one point putting the country at risk of default under former President Barack Obama in order to secure a decade of caps on domestic spending.

I hope nobody in the Biden administration thought the fact that they gave Trump everything he wanted meant they would be too embarrassed to pull these shenanigans. They are, as we know, shameless. They will have no problem simply saying “well, that was different” and moving right along. And their voters are fine with it as well.

This is going to be a huge battle. I hope everyone’s prepared for it.

A more complete version of the clip shows there was also talk of hitting the body with tremendous light https://t.co/rAOO1DPRoy

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 23, 2021

The people who worship this guy are the same ones who refuse to get vaccinated.

Memories…