DL Open Thread: Monday, May 3, 2021
‘Patriots For Delaware’ Looking To Elect RWNJ’s To School Boards. The News-Journal discovers what we’ve been writing about:
Patriots for Delaware has officially endorsed five school board candidates in the upcoming May 11 election.
And in most of those races, a similar dynamic has emerged: those endorsed by Patriots for Delaware, facing off against those endorsed by that district’s teachers union and local Democratic lawmakers.
Here are the candidates who have been endorsed by the districts’ teachers union and local Democrats:
Red Clay: Kecia Nesmith
Brandywine: Kim Stock
Cape Henlopen: Janis Hanwell
Woodbridge: Elaine Gallant.
Vote for them.
Black Worker Enslaved At SC Restaurant For Five Years. Yes, America is a racist country, and South Carolina is more racist than most. Thankfully, we have Schadenfreude to the rescue as SC Rethugs swallow Trump poison pill:
Lin Wood played a starring role in Georgia’s GOP civil war after the 2020 elections. Now the pro-Trump lawyer is taking his roadshow to South Carolina, where he’s campaigning as a “chaos” candidate to lead the state Republican Party.
Wood, who transformed from a top Atlanta trial lawyer to a leading election conspiracy theorist in November, moved to South Carolina in February. Then the firebrand lawyer shocked the political establishment in one of the GOP’s most important state parties by mounting an unexpectedly strong challenge to the incumbent chairman, Drew McKissick.
An adherent of the QAnon conspiracy theory, Wood contends Trump won the election in a landslide and is still president…
“We need some chaos in the Republican Party in South Carolina. Somebody needs to shake it up,” Wood said Tuesday in the city of Aiken to applause and laughter. “So here I am, Mr. Shaker.”
A day earlier, Wood heckled McKissick during a speech at a Hampton County GOP event and suggested the incumbent doesn’t care about stopping pedophiles. The two then had a face-to-face confrontation where McKissick swiped at Wood for raising vague allegations about “Chinese pornography.” The chairman’s supporters inevitably describe Wood as deranged, pointing out that the Georgia Bar is investigating his conduct and wants Wood to undergo a psychiatric evaluation.
Please, Lord, let this continue.
Contrast That With ‘Why It Took Biden To Carry Out Bernie’s Agenda’.
Cruz Admits That Rethugs Have ‘Looked The Other Way’ On Corporate Corruption. Why did he say that? As a threat to corporations for being too, in his word, ‘woke’. :
“This time,” he wrote, “we won’t look the other way on Coca-Cola’s $12 billion in back taxes owed. This time, when Major League Baseball lobbies to preserve its multibillion-dollar antitrust exception, we’ll say no thank you. This time, when Boeing asks for billions in corporate welfare, we’ll simply let the Export-Import Bank expire.”
What he said.
Blinken Winks, Nods, Towards Ukraine. Hey, you’d write that headline too, if you could. I can:
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken will travel to Kyiv next week, a clear signal of the Biden administration’s support for Ukraine’s government against threats from Russia.
In a statement announcing the trip, the State Department said Mr. Blinken would “reaffirm unwavering U.S. support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of Russia’s ongoing aggression.”
Confront The Amazon Economy. Maybe it’s me, but this seems like a great opportunity for bipartisan cooperation. Nobody likes Amazon’s monopolistic practices, do something about it.
West Virginia Puts Corporate Opioid Peddlers On Trial. The distributors are pulling out all the stops to keep the key expert witness from testifying:
In the West Virginia case, the distributors are seeking to prevent testimony by witnesses including West Virginia’s former chief health officer, Dr Rahul Gupta.
Defence lawyers want to block Gupta speaking about whether the pharmaceutical industry’s push to sell opioids led to overdose deaths, and whether addiction to prescription opioids drew people into using illegal narcotics such heroin and fentanyl which are not the main cause of overdoses.
The companies also do not want Gupta to speak about the epidemic’s impact on social issues such as the number of children taken into foster care.
What do you want to talk about?
As promised, the headline to this story — “Kansas Rep. Mark Samsel arrested for battery after physical altercation with student” — is insane, and every paragraph after it is more insane than the last.
https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article251069219.html
TL;dr: A 36-year-old state lawmaker, a lawyer, works as a substitute teacher, spends the day rambling about God, the Bible, suicide and masturbation, then knees a kid in the nuts. My favorite paragraph comes near the end — he’s the second Kansas state lawmaker arrested this year.
This is the sort of person whom Republicans think should be running the country, which makes me think that if we enacted some kind of mental capacity test to secure the right to vote, Republicans would finish third in every election.
Whoa.
What’s freaky is that rarely a day goes by now w/o some Rethug doing something really strange/illegal/perverted.
Their elected officials, at least, seem to be people with deep-seated psychological problems that cause them to act out in various inappropriate ways.
When they act out, they tap into common, primitive emotions — fear of the other, safety in a tribe, etc. — that their voters share, which gives them the confidence to keep on doing it. This is where the so-called “reasonable Republicans” failed us all, by failing to put the kibosh on these people back when they wore tricorn hats. As it turned out, the Mitt Romneys were never in control of their mob as much as they imagined.
By any reasonable standard these people — the Marjorie Taylor Greenes et al — should be considered mentally unfit for office. But with proper brainwashing via media and pulpits, they get elected instead.
Here’s yet another one. This Oregon legislator lets protestors into the Capitol, then walks around and enters at the front gate:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/or-lawmaker-faces-charges-after-video-showed-him-opening-capitol-door-to-protesters