What in God’s name did he do to deserve this? He’s the most servile of Trump loving Senators in the government? I don’t get it. Trump pretty much calls him a liberal. What’s he talking about? Graham isn’t happy. This may be a watershed moment for him. There is literally nothing he can do to make himself more of a Trump sycophant and it isn’t enough, They hate him anyway. He is nothing. Update. Ok. I guess it must be Ukraine. I suppose he can try to become a Putin loving symp in a vain attempt to remain “relevant” but that’s all he’s got left. Yikes. This is so fucking sick: Sounds just a little “Auschwitz-y” to me. She knew what she was saying. They all did.
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Feels like another big one Here’s an eye-catching headline: Man cited in Supreme Court LGBTQ rights case says he was never involved. In 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis on Friday, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of Lorie Smith, a Colorado web designer who objected to building a wedding web site for a gay couple … that did not exist. Wait, what?! Washington Post: Lorie Smith filed her initial case to Colorado district court in 2016, arguing that the state’s anti-discrimination law prevented her from including a message on the webpage for her company, 303 Creative, stating that she would not create wedding websites for gay couples. In subsequent court documents, her lawyers cited a query that they said was sent by an individual named Stewart with contact information that matches the person The Post interviewed. The request asked for Smith’s services for Stewart’s forthcoming wedding to a person named “Mike.” “We are getting married early next year and would love some design work done for our invites, placenames etc. We might also stretch to a website,” the message cited in the case read.
South Carolina, y’all Yup. Pretty much like this: In which a local deploys a metaphor: Sen. Lindsey Graham is from Central, SC where he once tended bar. Central is just south of Pickens. (I lived in Central, a former mill village, for a stretch in the mid-1980s.) Lindsey seems to have outlived his usefulness to local MAGA foot soldiers. Nobody gets indoctrinated around these parts. Hell, no: Back in the day, the weekly Mountain Monitor of Travelers Rest used to document the weekly car wrapped around a tree and feature (IIRC) articles borrowed from The Thunderbolt (Klan), the apparent voice of truth in America. Since then, T.R. (just north of Greenville) has gentrified some. Pickens, less so, apparently. Southern Poverty Law Center on the National Justice Party.
If you were to do an informal poll of conventional progressive opinion—asking where is the public to be found, in acts of speech or in the marketplace—I suspect most liberals, and probably not a few leftists, would say: in acts of speech. Since the eighteenth century, speech has been firmly associated with the public sphere or the public square. “The people’s darling privilege”: that’s how freedom of speech was understood, as the instrument of the people, assembled in their sovereign and public capacity. There’s a long history behind the notion, stretching back to Aristotle, whose justification for the claim that man is a political animal rests upon the fact that human beings, unlike other animals, have the capacity for speech. […]
Putin and American conservatives: peas in a pod We don’t turn back our clocks for another four months. If American conservatives could have their way, they would turn back the last half-century. Back to when America was “great” in their eyes, in MAGA’s eyes. Back to when white dominance and The Lost Cause went unquestioned. Back to before the country agreed with the Civil Rights movement’s demands for equal voting rights and civil rights for minorities. Back to the world of the Cleavers and the Nelsons. Back to when women, too, knew their places. Nostalgia not for lost innocence but for lost dominance is what made Donald Trump so attractive to the movement that grew up around him. Speaking recently with Amanda Marcotte, David Neiwert (“The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right’s Assault on American Democracy“) observed that fascism and neo-fascism have “actually been present in America since at least the early 1900s.” The increasing radicalization of the right has been there for years.
That didn’t take long They went there.
I just don’t know what to say about this… Tim Miller: Late Friday, the Ron DeSantis’s extremely online campaign team released a video to contrast the Florida governor’s stalwart bigotry with Donald Trump’s lighter touch and highlight the fact that their candidate stands out as the most hostile to LGBT Americans—in a field that, mind you, also includes Mike Pence. The ad, which seems to have been originally produced by anonymous Twitter user ProudElephantUS, was repurposed by the “DeSantis War Room” with the following message: “To Wrap up ‘Pride Month,’ let’s hear from the politician who did more than any other to celebrate it…” The video begins with a sizzle reel of Donald Trump promising to protect LGBT Americans, saying that he doesn’t care what bathroom Caitlyn Jenner uses, telling Barbara Walters that transgender women would be allowed to compete in the Miss Universe contest, and contrasting his views on gays favorably with how the group is viewed by Islamic terrorists.
Literally: The Chinese spy balloon that was shot down over the Atlantic Ocean in early February was built, at least partly, using American off-the-shelf parts, a U.S. official has confirmed to ABC News. The official could not say whether any of the American gear was sold illicitly to China but said determining whether any of it came from illegal trade was a topic of serious concern among officials since some items — like chips — are forbidden to sell to certain markets. Later Thursday, Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen.
This is just depressing: Six months since the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol completed its work, a far-right ecosystem of true believers has embraced “J6” as the animating force of their lives. They attend the criminal trials of the more prominent rioters charged in the attack. They gather to pray and sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the outer perimeter of the District of Columbia jail, where some two dozen defendants are held. Last week, dozens showed up at an unofficial House hearing convened by a handful of Republican lawmakers to challenge “the fake narrative that an insurrection had occurred on Jan. 6,” as set forth by Jeffrey Clark, a witness at the hearing and a former Justice Department official who worked to undo the results of the 2020 election. The 90-minute event was a through-the-looking-glass alternative to the damning case against former President Donald J. Trump presented last year by the Jan. 6 committee.
We knew Trump had called Arizona Governor Doug Ducey (remember seeing that video of him getting a phone call with the “hail to the chief” ring tone while he was signing the electoral count paperwork?) We had not heard for sure until now whether Trump was doing what we thought he was doing: In a phone call in late 2020,President Donald Trump tried to pressure Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) to overturn the state’spresidential election results, saying that if enough fraudulent votes could be found it would overcome Trump’s narrow loss in Arizona, according to three people familiar with the call. Trump also repeatedly asked Vice President Mike Pence to call Ducey and prod him to find the evidence to substantiate Trump’s claims of fraud, according to two of these people. Pence called Ducey several times to discuss the election, they said, though he did not follow Trump’s directions to pressure the governor. The extent of Trump’s efforts to cajole Ducey into helping him stay in power have not before been reported, even as other efforts by Trump’s lawyer and allies to pressure Arizona officials have been made public.