DL Open Thread Sunday, May 2, 2021

What the fuck is wrong with Republicans? Seriously, these people are some kind of fucked up. Lest you think that maybe the Mormons, who didn’t much care for Trump, are any better than the rest of them, the 2,100 attendees at the Utah GOP convention last night booed Mitt Romney and called him a communist because he voted to remove Trump from office. Don’t get me wrong, Mitt Romney deserves to be heckled, but if he’s a communist, then that hall was full of 2,100 people jealous of a communist.

The simple truth is that if this were a democratic nation, instead of a collection of 50 Balkanized states, Republicans would disappear as a national party. This article in the Atlantic spells out the GOP’s structural advantage to illustrate why either the filibuster goes or the Senate will cease to function, if it hasn’t already. Why is the filibuster so important to Republicans?

What share of the vote would either party have needed to reach a filibuster-proof 60 seats? By shifting the vote in each of the 100 elections by the same number of percentage points until Democrats or Republicans were ahead in 60 races, we found that Democrats would have needed to win 55.8 percent of the national vote. Republicans would have needed to win only 50.2 percent of the vote to escape the zone—barely a popular majority at all.

Kind of ironic, isn’t it, that conservatives are all riled up about an imaginary pedophile ring, but they ignore a known pedophile ring that’s been operating for centuries. Yeah, I mean the Catholic Church. The scumbags who run it in the United States, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, are considering a move to bar abortion-legalizing politicians, such as the second Catholic president, from receiving Communion. In case you hadn’t noticed, they’re regular P.R. wizards when they’re not busy diddling the kiddies.

If you’ve ever seen that Food Network personality Guy Fieri, who hosts “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” you might, like me, have developed the opinion that he’s a world-class douche-bro, but this story opened my eyes: To help restaurant workers through the pandemic, Fieri set up a charity that raised $25 million and gave out $500 grants to 43,000 servers and line workers who lost jobs. He got donations from lots of big corporations, and Fieri said he wouldn’t slag those who didn’t donate, but he made an exception for one guy — that ultimate douchebro, Jeff Bezos.

The Last Guy isn’t the only overweight gasbag upset by Joe Biden. North Korea’s Supreme Leader — what’s that nepotism-anointed sack of fat’s name again? — says Biden made a “grave blunder” in saying it saw the most pathetic nation on Earth as a security threat. I won’t live to see it, but I predict that someday the Chinese will nuke those annoying little fuckers themselves.

The floor’s yours.