A roster of idiots

source

“I ran for leader with one mission: to fundamentally change how the Senate operates and upend the status quo so we can actually start representing the voters who put us here. When I announced, I said that we are in a moment where we need dramatic change. The voters confirmed that last week when they elected President Trump and Republicans took the majority in both chambers of Congress with a clear mandate,” [Rick Scott] said in a statement after losing the vote for Senate majority leader.

He added, “While it isn’t the result we hoped for, I will do everything possible to make sure John Thune is successful in accomplishing President Trump’s agenda. I would also like to thank John Cornyn for running a great race.”

[...]

Thune has served as Senate Republican whip, the No. 2-ranking position in the Senate GOP leadership, since 2019, and largely managed operation of the Senate floor since McConnell suffered a concussion from a fall in 2023.

He received 29 votes, to Sen. John Cornyn’s (R-Texas) 24. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) had been knocked out of the running on an earlier ballot.

  The Hill

Is Ted Cruz the only Republican Senator less liked than Rick Scott?

Senate Republican Whip John Thune (S.D.) [faced] a barrage of opposition from Trump allies ranging from Tucker Carlson to Sean Hannity.

[...]

Hard-line conservatives are abandoning their plan to nominate a challenger to Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) bid for the gavel during Wednesday’s internal House GOP elections, opting for a different protest strategy to showcase resistance to his leadership, two sources familiar with the matter told The Hill.

The plan B being plotted by the House Freedom Caucus would involve forcing a secret, recorded vote on Johnson’s nomination, according to the sources, who were granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive internal deliberations.

Because Johnson is running unopposed, the conference could nominate him for the top job by voice vote, which Republicans did in 2016 to give former Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) the nod. Hard-liners, however, want to force a recorded vote — and avoid a voice vote — to make their reservations regarding Johnson’s leadership clear. One of the sources said members would have the ability to write in a candidate if they wanted to.

The strategy is a change from Tuesday afternoon, when conservatives were discussing plans to nominate an alternative candidate to Johnson for Speaker during Wednesday’s internal GOP elections. Those on the right flank were discussing whom to nominate. One source told The Hill three people were prepared to throw their hat in the ring.

  The Hill

Trump backs the Christo-fascist Johnson.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 01:24 pm:

Thune has never gotten along with Trump. He called on Trump to drop out of the race when the Access Hollywood tape broke in 2016. He was harshly critical of Trump in the wake of J6 - so much so that Trump endorsed Thune’s primary opponent in 2022. Thune then returned the favor by endorsing Tim Scott in the presidential primary against Trump. When asked if he would support Trump if he was the nominee, Thune refused to answer, saying only “I hope we will have better options.”

Thune had the backing of his mentor Mitch McConnell.

  Meidas Touch

I heard someone say that in the battle between Trump/Scott and McConnell/Thune you should bet on McConnell. I didn't think so. I would have lost.  Gladly.

John Cornyn was also in the race, which threatened to split the establishment vote, allowing MAGA challenger Rick Scott to make it into the runoff. But it was not to be as Scott finished 3rd on the first ballot, then Thune narrowly defeated Cornyn in the final vote.

[...]It was reported that Trump wanted to endorse Scott, but knew he didn’t have the votes so he didn’t want to back him only to be publicly humiliated. But Musk backed him, along with all the far-right MAGA Senators. The MAGA meltdown after the vote was fun to watch.

Oxymoron

Tom Cotton will take over Rubio’s role as Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

  Meidas Touch

He had no idea what he was admitting

And speaking of CRT...

CRT in math???  Jesus Christ.  Soon you won't be able to teach anything in Florida but religion.  And only Christian religion.

Also...

A school board in southwest Missouri voted not to renew the contract of a teacher after parents accused her of using critical race theory.

Kim Morrison, an English teacher at Greenfield High School, said the vote in mid-March came shortly after allegations surfaced about a worksheet she used as part of teaching the book "Dear Martin."

This was her second year teaching the award-winning young adult novel about racism in an elective contemporary literature class. It was the first year students were assigned a 15-question worksheet called "How Racially Privileged Are You?"

In late February, Morrison said she was called to the office of high school principal Jennifer Roberts and told there had been complaints from parents.

[...]

In the letter, Kell confirmed the board's decision not to rehire Morrison for the 2022-23 year. It stated this reason: "Your decision to incorporate the worksheet associated with the novel 'Dear Martin,' due to the content and subject matter."

In a subsequent interview with the News-Leader, Kell said the vote was not unanimous. He said the vote not to rehire Morrison went against his recommendation and that of the high school principal.

"There was administrative support for her return," he said.

[...]

Morrison said she received no complaints about the book this year or last. But, after the worksheet, a student was upset about taking a "racial privilege quiz" and commented it was "trying to make me feel guilty for being white."

[...]

Morrison, who returned to teaching four years ago after raising a family, said she opted to speak up out of concern for other teachers, in her district and others. She said despite not being rehired, she received good job evaluations.

"I have to be the spokesperson now because most of the teachers at Greenfield are not tenured so they can't speak," she said. "If this is how they terminate teachers — without asking questions, without speaking to the teacher — then no one is secure."

She added: "And if they are opposed to broadening, to examining, their viewpoints, they are not doing students any good."

   Springfield News-Leader

Well, they're keeping the white ones from feeling uncomfortable.

UPDATE:

UPDATE:

Good one, Pete

Too bad Arkansans won't hear him.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

GOP has no redeeming qualities

This is a hell of a thread on Nina Morrison's confirmation hearing.  Check it out.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

No attempt to hide it

Even before they know who the nominee is, they're admitting they won't likely vote to confirm, admitting they're simply there to obstruct.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Seth is so close

More accurately, "help a party of complete marks take power."

GOP: Performance Party

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

And this is the idiot Trump endorsed as a replacement for Liz Cheney

Anyone who doesn't know that freedom of speech and its abridgement as set out in the Constitution only applies to cases involving government restriction does not belong in Congress.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

WE must retire the phrase "quiet part out loud"

Because it's no longer quiet.

Shameless.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Tom Cotton is still a prick

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Another candidate for most despicable politician alive

Slime weasel.

UPDATE:  And another:

These assholes have been the worst offenders, and now they want to extricate themselves from the shit they've been stirring.

And another:

The second "perfect call"

We can safely surmise that Trump's Georgia call, along with his Ukraine call, are merely two instances of what have been four years of "perfect calls".

DRUDGE HEADLINE: “COMMANDER IN THIEF?”

CARL BERNSTEIN: “This was something far worse than Watergate.”

[...]

On Sunday, politics here switched from a national fascination to an international spectacle, courtesy of — surprise! — President Donald Trump, who was secretly recorded trying to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to throw out votes for an opponent and “find” votes for himself.

[...]

It started on Saturday when Trump and his team reached out to talk to Raffensperger, who, according to an adviser, felt he would be unethically pressured by the president. Raffensperger had been here before: In November he accused Trump ally and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham of improperly exhorting him to meddle in the election to help Trump win Georgia.

[...]

So why not record the call with the president, Raffensperger’s advisers thought, if nothing else for fact-checking purposes. “This is a man who has a history of reinventing history as it occurs,” one of them told Playbook. “So if he’s going to try to dispute anything on the call, it’s nice to have something like this, hard evidence, to dispute whatever he’s claiming about the secretary. Lindsey Graham asked us to throw out legally cast ballots. So yeah, after that call, we decided maybe we should do this.”

  Politico

CREW is investigating Graham's election tampering.

Raffensperger’s team kept quiet about the call and the recording and waited. The president made the next move, claiming on Sunday morning via Twitter that Raffensperger was “unwilling, or unable, to answer” questions about his baseless claims of widespread voter fraud. “Respectfully, President Trump: What you're saying is not true,” Raffensperger replied at 10:27 a.m. “The truth will come out.” It wasn’t an empty promise.

[...]

“This phone call is bad,” Georgia conservative commentator Erick Erickson said on Twitter. We asked him to expand on that, and here’s what he added: “I think the general worry is that the GOP early vote [in the Georgia runoffs] actually came on strong [late] and there’s a real worry that the president shows up tomorrow and messes it all up. The North Georgia GOP has to turn out on Election Day. They’ve lagged the whole state. The President goes to Dalton tomorrow to get them out and now people are worried he spends his time attacking the GA GOP … There is real nervousness.”

Erickson and other Republicans have been concerned since November that the president’s voter fraud rhetoric will dampen turnout, a fear intensified by far-right activists who’ve suggested that Trump voters not go to the polls unless Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue fight harder to somehow cancel Biden’s Georgia win. Trump’s handling of a coronavirus relief package and his vetoing of a defense bill is another concern: Congress overrode the vote, but Perdue and Loeffler skipped out so they weren’t crosswise with Trump.

[...]

“Look, voters aren’t paying attention to all this stuff, people like us are,” one Georgia Republican strategist who’s working to elect Loeffler and Perdue told Playbook. “But at a certain point, all these little things that don’t look like they matter could matter. I still feel OK. But this doesn’t help. The president needs to cut out the Leeroy Jenkins s---. Unfortunately, he won’t.”

[...]

WAPO’S DAN BALZ: “There are but 16 days left in President Trump’s term, but there is no doubt that he will use all of his remaining time in office to inflict as much damage as he can on democracy — with members of a now-divided Republican Party acting as enablers.”

[...]

Suffice to say it’s a bit alarming that 10 former defense secretaries felt the need to get this on the record in the WaPo: “As senior Defense Department leaders have noted, ‘there’s no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of a U.S. election.’ Efforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory. Civilian and military officials who direct or carry out such measures would be accountable, including potentially facing criminal penalties, for the grave consequences of their actions on our republic.”

[...]

Late Sunday, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas announced he would not join a dozen of his Republican colleagues and object to the certification of electoral votes on Wednesday.

I wonder who said what to Cotton to get him to correct course. Maybe Paul Ryan's statement did it?

"Efforts to reject the votes of the Electoral College and sow doubt about Joe Biden's victory strike at the foundation of our republic. It is difficult to conceive of a more anti-democratic and anti-conservative act than a federal intervention to overturn the results of state-certified elections and disenfranchise millions of Americans. The fact that this effort will fail does not mean it will not do significant damage to American Democracy.”

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Monday that it was unlikely his office would open an investigation into his weekend phone call with President Donald Trump, but suggested a criminal probe could still be launched by an Atlanta-area district attorney.

  Politico

I'd say both are unlikely, even though they should be done.

On Monday, Raffensperger declined to say whether he personally found Trump’s requests in their conversation to be lawful.

“I’m not a lawyer. All I know is that we’re going to follow the law, follow the process,” he said. “Truth matters. And we’ve been fighting these rumors for the last two months.”

[...]

Because Trump personally spoke with Raffensperger on Saturday and recently had a conversation with the chief investigator in the secretary of state’s office, Raffensperger told ABC’s “Good Morning America” in an interview Monday morning that “there may be a conflict of interest" that would inhibit any potential investigation.

Not unless Georgia's AG isn't independent of the secretary's office.

Raffensperger went on to say: “I understand that the Fulton County District Attorney wants to look at it. Maybe that’s the appropriate venue for it to go.”

Good enough. No pardon is possible for Trump for any crimes committed against the state of Georgia.

Trump asked that officials determine that ballots were shredded in Fulton County and that Dominion election machinery was removed or tampered with. He also suggested Raffensperger could be guilty of a “criminal offense” by knowing about alleged election interference and not reporting it.

In fact, it is the president who may have opened himself up to legal liability in the phone call, potentially violating federal and state statutes intended to guard against the solicitation of election fraud.

[...]

And despite the Times’ reporting that the White House switchboard had made 18 other calls to the secretary’s office over the past two months, Raffensperger maintained that he had never spoken to Trump prior to Saturday.

“No, I never believed it was appropriate to speak to the president. But he pushed out — I guess he had his staff push us. They wanted to call,” Raffensperger said.

[...]

Although “I just preferred not to talk to someone when we’re in litigation,” Raffensperger continued, “we took the call, and we had a conversation.”

Perhaps we should be glad he did. But Trump's team is claiming the taping of the conversation violates rules on litigation discussions.

Even Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), a staunch Trump ally who plans to join a group of at least 12 Republican senators in challenging Biden’s Electoral College win, offered a negative assessment of the president’s call on Monday.

“One of the things, I think, that everyone has said is that this call was not a helpful call,” she told Fox News.

Oooh, careful with such harsh criticism, Marsha.

On Capitol Hill, two House Democrats [Reps. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and Kathleen Rice (D-N.Y.)] wrote to FBI Director Christopher Wray on Monday morning, urging him to authorize a criminal investigation of Trump’s call with Raffensperger for potential violations of federal election fraud statutes.

[...]

The lawmakers also suggested that Trump violated Georgia laws against soliciting election fraud, and they said that if Wray agreed, he should formally refer the matter to the Georgia attorney general or a local district attorney.

At the very least. 

Also, I'm starting to wonder if Trump made that crazy call to deflect attention from the hacking of all those government agencies. That just dropped out of the news, and it could be the worst threat to national security in our history.

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

This is what they'll be voting for

Which is why Trump announced a list of nominees in his second term.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Tom Cotton and humans using other humans for their own enrichment

Tom Cotton - perfectly named, considering.

Last week, Cotton [R-Arkansas] introduced a bill to prohibit federal funds from being used in schools to teach "The 1619 Project," which posits that slavery was embedded in the country's very foundation.

[...]

It is breathtaking in the year 2020 to hear a United States senator use the term "necessary evil" to describe slavery. But it is important to note that Cotton's comments came in a context: Millions of Americans are waiting on Congress to pass another economic relief package, lest they lose their homes and ability to feed their families. But Senate Republicans haven't taken action yet — in part because some of them worry that unemployment benefits are too generous.

[...]

Republicans haven't deployed the term "necessary evil," but they are making the case it is more important to get people back to work than to pay to let them stay home.

[...]

If the aim is to take care of Americans during the pandemic, then the solution is relatively easy: keep giving them money. If Republicans won't do so, it is worth asking why not. To ensure that existing businesses continue to have a cheap labor supply? To reduce unemployment rates to goose President Trump's election prospects? Why is it necessary to force Americans back to work? And is it truly worth the cost of endangering their health and safety — or is it just convenient for a few people at the top of the heap?

Low-wage work in a pandemic is certainly not the same thing as chattel slavery. Modern-day Americans still have a choice, technically, about whether to work or not. But a similar justification undergirds the viewpoints of elites in both cases: Humans are a means to an end — a better economy, efficient production, beating another country at war — instead of having value in and of themselves.

[...]

Rather ominously, Cotton's comments echoed America's original enslavers, who justified themselves by saying slavery was needed to build the south's economy — and to maintain white supremacy. Cotton, however, seemed to argue on Sunday that he meant only to refer to the Founders' views that the actual process of making a union — that is, bringing the states together under the Constitution to form the United States — required northern states to compromise in order to bring southern slave states into the fold.

[...]

Even viewed in that light, Cotton's statement is troubling, because it endorses the notion that the lives, bodies, and freedom of Black slaves were an acceptable down payment to build this country. The idea is abhorrent — and, for many Americans, was abhorrent at the time the time of the founding.

[...]

The antifederalists rejected the idea that it was worth accommodating slavery in order to achieve the union. Some recognized America's leaders wouldn't be willing to endure the evil they deemed necessary to inflict on others. "Where is the man, who under the influence of sober dispassionate reasoning, and not void of natural affection, can lay his hand upon his heart and say, I am willing my sons and my daughters should be torn from me and doomed to perpetual slavery?" a trio wrote for a Massachusetts newspaper in 1788.

[...]

Whenever the term "necessary evil" is used, it should be questioned: Necessary to whom? Evil for whom? And for what purpose? Is the evil truly justified, or merely convenient?

  MSN

Cotton’s bill, the Saving American History Act of 2020, labels the 1619 Project as “a distortion of American history,” and would cut off federal professional development funds from any school district that teaches the project’s curriculum, as well as reducing other federal funding in the amount estimated for that district’s “cost associated with teaching the 1619 Project, including in planning time and teaching time.”

[...]

In his interview with the Arkansas paper, Cotton called the 1619 Project “left-wing propaganda,” “factually, historically flawed,” and “revisionist history at its worst.”

  Mediaite

"Saving American History."

“[I]f local left-wing school boards want to fill their children’s heads with anti-American rot, that’s their regrettable choice,” said Cotton. “But they ought not to benefit from federal tax dollars to teach America’s children to hate America.”

Always with the "they hate America" trope.

“It won’t be much money,” he pointed out. “But even a penny is too much to go to the 1619 Project in our public schools. The New York Times should not be teaching American history to our kids.”

How many kids read The New York Times?

Cotton spoke at length about the core premise of the 1619 Project. “The entire premise of the New York Times’ factually, historically flawed 1619 Project,” he said, “is that America is at root, a systemically racist country to the core and irredeemable. I reject that root and branch.”

Is that a reference to the trees from which Southerners like Tom Cotton hung black people for centuries?

Cotton also addressed how he believes slavery should be taught.

[...]

“We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction,” he said.

A necessary evil. That's America's excuse for every atrocity it perpetrates.

GOP: Just plain nuts

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) introduced a House resolution Thursday calling on lawmakers to ban organizations or political groups that have historically supported the Confederacy or slavery in the U.S., a list he said includes the Democratic Party.

“A great portion of the history of the Democratic Party is filled with racism and hatred. Since people are demanding we rid ourselves of the entities, symbols, and reminders of the repugnant aspects of our past, then the time has come for Democrats to acknowledge their party’s loathsome and bigoted past, and consider changing their party name to something that isn’t so blatantly and offensively tied to slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination, and the Ku Klux Klan,” Gohmert said in a statement.

The resolution is co-sponsored by GOP Reps. Andy Biggs (Ariz.), Jody Hice (Ga.), Randy Weber (Texas) and Andy Harris (Md.)

[...]

Gohmert also cited examples of racist policies within the Democratic Party’s history, including former President Woodrow Wilson’s endorsement of racial discrimination.

  The Hill

Meanwhile...

Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) has introduced a bill to prohibit the use of federal funds to teach the 1619 Project in public schools.

“The New York Times’s 1619 Project is a racially divisive, revisionist account of history that denies the noble principles of freedom and equality on which our nation was founded. Not a single cent of federal funding should go to indoctrinate young Americans with this left-wing garbage,” said Cotton in a release.

Published last year, the 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that honors the year the first African slaves were brought to an English colony.

  The Hill

I'm not sure "honors" is the appropriate word.

"The goal of The 1619 Project is to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year. Doing so requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country," said Jake Silverstein, editor in chief of the New York Times Magazine, in a letter.

The "Saving American History Act of 2020" would require the Department of Education to determine the cost associated with planning and teaching the 1619 Project in schools in order to reduce federal funding by that amount.

Irony in the GOP party died a long time ago. It's corpse is stinking.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Tom Cottons of this country are orgasming

And we are dangerously close to an "emergency" takeover by the Trump cabal.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

WTF

Is this the GOP talking point on this now?

Will the voters hold accountable the asshats who enabled the spread in this country because they let the president pretend nothing needed to be done until it was too late?

McConnell at it again

Now he's holding up the USMCA deal that Nancy Pelosi was just crowing about.

Keeping Trump from scoring a win to own the libs.

And Trump was trumpeting it, too.  How's he going to take it?

Better talk to Mitch, Your Lardship.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Tom Cotton forgot to coordinate his messages with His Lardship

He'll need to get on that.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE: