Politics-What's on your mind?

[homoe]

Collins ‘exasperated’ by backlash to Federalist Society fundraiser.

Sen. Susan Collins reportedly sounded ‘exasperated’ when asked about the backlash she has received since attending a private campaign fundraising event held in 2019 at the $4 million summer mansion of Leonard Leo, the executive vice president of the Federalist Society, the leading force in putting judges who oppose abortion rights on the federal bench.

“So I went to a 20-person fundraiser,” she said. “It’s just ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous.”

To refresh our memories Collins voted to confirm Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh then tried to claim she was mislead by Kavanaugh!

[homoe]

Liar Liar Pants On Fire!



Sidebar: After that video, how could anyone believe anything that came out of her mouth!

[homoe]

Originally Posted by homoe

The Federalist Society, the conservative legal group that pushed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's appointment, has been the biggest contributor to the re-election campaign of Sen. Susan Collins, the embattled Maine Republican, since she voted to confirm him, federal filings show.


https://www.salon.com/2020/07/10/is-...campaign-cash/

For someone claiming two terms were enough.....she SURE ran for re-election, grabbing donations from questionable sources, time after time after her two terms were up!

[homoe]

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh ducked out the back door of a steakhouse in Washington, D.C.last week, when a group of demonstrators gathered outside to protest his vote to jettison Roe v. Wade, Politico and activists reported.



https://www.huffpost.com/entry/brett...b0359fa47b6389

[homoe]

Originally Posted by homoe

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh ducked out the back door of a steakhouse in Washington, D.C.last week, when a group of demonstrators gathered outside to protest his vote to jettison Roe v. Wade, Politico and activists reported.



https://www.huffpost.com/entry/brett...b0359fa47b6389

Likwise, as one of the gals on the View said, getting out my tiny violin ....

This SOB should be grilled and served as supper!

[homoe]

CBS News
Lawyers for Sen. Lindsey Graham are arguing that the South Carolina Republican cannot be forced to testify before a Fulton County grand jury about alleged election interference, claiming he has "absolute immunity" under the US Constitution for phone calls he placed to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.



A federal judge on Wednesday temporarily halted a subpoena demanding testimony from South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham in a Georgia special grand jury investigation into former President Donald Trump's behavior after losing the 2020 election.

Graham filed a motion earlier Wednesday in the U.S. District Court in South Carolina in an effort to avoid testifying about Trump's efforts to overturn the state's 2020 election results.

IMO...this judge must be a Republican.

[JDeere]

I'm still completely disillusioned with it ALL!!!

I don't ever remember, when I was younger, ever seeing this much divide, murder, etc regarding politics and or religion.

[homoe]

It was no shock that state Rep. Ron Hanks and Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters handily lost their recent Republican primaries in Colorado for U.S. Senate and secretary of state.

Hanks was outspent 14-to-1 by his rival. Peters, who was vying to become Colorado's top elections official, had been indicted on seven felony charges alleging she helped orchestrate a breach of her voting system's hard drive.

But this past week, both candidates formally requested recounts of their primary elections from June 28, suggesting widespread irregularities seen by no one other than their own campaigns and allies.

“I have reasons to believe extensive malfeasance occurred in the June 2022 primary,” Peters wrote in her recount request, “and that the apparent outcome of this election does not reflect the will of Colorado voters not only for myself but also for many other America First statewide and local primary candidates.”

America First is a coalition of conservative candidates and officeholders who, among other things, promote the falsehood that Democrat Joe Biden did not win the 2020 presidential election.

[homoe]

Senator Ted Cruz Says Supreme Court Was Wrong In Same-Sex Marriage Ruling.


Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on Saturday said he believes the U.S. Supreme Court “was overreaching” and “clearly wrong” when it legalized same-sex marriage across the country in the 2015 landmark Obergefell v. Hodges decision.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ted-c...b0116f21bcf44c

[cathexis]

Originally Posted by homoe

CBS News
Lawyers for Sen. Lindsey Graham are arguing that the South Carolina Republican cannot be forced to testify before a Fulton County grand jury about alleged election interference, claiming he has "absolute immunity" under the US Constitution for phone calls he placed to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.



A federal judge on Wednesday temporarily halted a subpoena demanding testimony from South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham in a Georgia special grand jury investigation into former President Donald Trump's behavior after losing the 2020 election.

Graham filed a motion earlier Wednesday in the U.S. District Court in South Carolina in an effort to avoid testifying about Trump's efforts to overturn the state's 2020 election results.

IMO...this judge must be a Republican.

It doesn't sound that hard to find out his party affiliation. Just get me the name and state the Federal judge worked. I live for research.

For many East of the Rockies, there was (not sure about any continuation) a judge might be shared by different jurisdictions. I know it is still in use on the Navajo Reservation.

[Orema]

2022 and 2224 is on my mind.

2022
Michigan primary voting is in a couple weeks and I'm voting Democrat right down the line. I'm not doing absentee voting this year. Will show up, stand in line, cast my vote.

2024
As usual, am commited to voting for the Democratic nominee—no matter whom it is nor how much I may have to hold my breath while voting. I don't like it when Non-Democratic politicians (Bernie Sanders comes to mind) get a chance at the Democratic nomination, but they too will get my vote if any of them become the nominee for the Democratic party.

I imagine the usual suspects will run again for the Democratic nomination (Bloomberg, Booker, Buttigieg, Gabbard, Gillibrand, Kerry, O'Rourke). I expect Newsome and others to join the crowd. I can't stand half these people, especially Bloomberg, but even he will get my vote if nominated.

And I would still vote for Clinton if she ran again. I still think she'd make a better president than Biden, Trump, or DeSantis (whom I expect will be the Republican nominee).

[Orema]

Was watching the hearings the other night and of course it was all about Trump. At the same time the local affiliate interrupted the hearings with commercials for Republican politicians who proudly claim to be endorsed by Trump (primary voting in my state is coming up on August 2 and we're being bombarded with political commercials). It had a surreal aspect to it, but more than anything I was left with the feeling that nothing will come of these hearings. A few people may be punished (Bannon comes to mind), but not Trump nor his family. And Trump will maintain power with Republicans.

I'll need another escape this political season. Horatio Cane and his team are still looking good (I know, I need to move on). Maybe I'll keep my subscription to Paramount Plus, but it will probably be cheaper to just purchase CSI: Miami on Prime or DVD. Or maybe I'll revisit The Wire, Omar has a wonderful way of putting things in the right perspective.

[Orema]

Michigan Republican candidates for governor, Ryan Kelley, Garrett Soldano, Tudor Dixon and Kevin Rinke at a debate in Grand Rapids, Mich. on July 6. (Michael Buck/AP)


Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s (D) first term has been wracked by turmoil. She has dealt with a bitter backlash over pandemic restrictions, been the subject of a kidnapping plot and sparred repeatedly with former president Donald Trump. She has even taken heat over a private plane flight to visit her ailing father.

But, as the state’s Michigan’s GOP gubernatorial primary nears on Aug. 2, the Democratic governor seems to be sitting comfortably above the chaos among her potential Republican challengers.

Five of 10 Republican candidates were kicked off the ballot last month for submitting fraudulent petition signatures, prompting the best-known among the disqualified, former Detroit police chief James Craig, to run as a write-in candidate.

One of the surviving five, Ryan Kelley, was arrested by the FBI for participating in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Kelley has pleaded not guilty, and an appeals court ruled he can stay on the ballot.

The putative front-runner, Tudor Dixon, is a Grand Rapids conservative commentator who in mid-July held a within-the-margin-of-error lead. She is backed by the wealthy and politically influential Dick and Betsy DeVos (education secretary in the Trump administration). Dixon has fervently courted Trump’s endorsement — so far, unsuccessfully — and embraced plenty of MAGA-friendly issues. (She thinks Trump won Michigan in 2020, even though he trailed Joe Biden by 154,000 votes.)

All this has not exactly aided the GOP dream of unseating Whitmer. A recent Detroit News/WDIV poll showed the governor comfortably ahead of all her challengers in head-to-head match ups, including leading Dixon, 50.7 percent to 40.3 percent.

How could a state once known for producing moderate Republicans get to this point? Michigan, after all, gave us former president Gerald Ford, and governors George W. Romney and William G. Milliken, who, between them, kept the governor’s mansion in GOP hands from 1963 to 1983.

You can partly blame demographics. Many of the old-school Republicans of my parents’ era are dying or are retired (some might say hiding) from active participation. For whatever reason, their courtliness has not survived, perhaps because the swerve at the national party’s top was toward nastiness.

My mother, a staunch Michigan Republican, started worrying about this more than two decades ago. In 2000, watching the Bush-Gore race, she worried that the mean turn politics had taken, as well as intense scrutiny of politicians’ personal lives, would drive good potential candidates away. She wondered, “Who are they going to get to run?”

Now, in the wild Michigan GOP primary and in too many Republican races across the country, instead of men and women of distinction, we get amateurs who cry victim at every opportunity. That includes, astonishingly, when they fail to follow a basic civic rite that earlier generations had little problem handling: collecting petition signatures to win a spot on the ballot.

My mother approached this task with a reverence that matched her activity in our Catholic church’s Madonna Guild. As a child, I remember seeing her big brown clipboard, holding a petition with neat rows of spaces for names, addresses and signatures. When she filled a page, she signed it and turned it into the local party office for verification.

Contrast the care she and other campaign volunteers back then took with the sloppy approach that the disqualified GOP five delegated this crucial task. Lacking the networks that seasoned party veterans could boast, they simply hired petition circulators.

Instead of rounding up real voters, these paid collectors turned in page after page of fake names, not just for governor but for other races. Eye-popping stories have emerged of petitions left sitting out on picnic tables for anyone to walk by and sign.

The irony of this mess is that people in Michigan are fired up to vote. The Detroit News/WDIV poll found that state residents scored 9.2 on a scale of one to 10 when it comes to being motivated to go to the polls. People who consider themselves “strong Democrats” ranked highest, with “strong Republicans” right behind them.

In other words, the ousted Republican candidates didn’t have to cheat: If they’d put the time in, they could have landed on the ballot, legally.

Now contrast the Republican petition debacle with the largely Democratic-supported ballot drive to codify abortion rights in the Michigan constitution this fall collected the most signatures of any initiative in state history.

Although the flood of more than 750,000 signatures has yet to be verified, organizers of the Reproductive Freedom for All campaign are confident they easily met the threshold of 450,000 valid names required to make it onto the ballot.

The professionalism of that signature-collection campaign only underlined the cynical amateurishness of the GOP candidates’ petition effort.

If voters reelect Whitmer this fall, despite the tumult of her first term, it may be because she represents a calmer bet, compared with the alternative. For that, thanks in part will be due to the vanishing of Michigan’s moderate Republicans.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...primary-chaos/
________________________

Whitmer has my vote this year. Too bad she isn't running for POTUS in 2024 (I'm banking that she'll run in 2028— Gretchen for President ). She'd get my vote for POTUS, if only in the primaries. I'd vote for her before voting for Newsome and I like him. I'd probably vote for Whitmer before VP Harris in the POTUS primaries if they ever run against each other.

[JDeere]

I read online that there is a new party..The Forward Party, a mix of dems and repubs and others who are not aligned with their parties ideals, etc.

I'm waiting to see how that pans out before making comments, just found it interesting.

[Soft*Silver]

Originally Posted by JDeere

I read online that there is a new party..The Forward Party, a mix of dems and repubs and others who are not aligned with their parties ideals, etc.

I'm waiting to see how that pans out before making comments, just found it interesting.

I saw that too! I’m wondering how that’s going to pan out and how it will affect voting. I don’t want to see what happened with Hillary and Bernie again. If the people who voted for those two had joined together and voted for one of them Trump would’ve never gotten into office. My fear is that a new forward party with divide votes again. But I guess change must start somewhere….

[nhplowboi]

Trump will be receiving a *tax-break* for Ivana’s golf course grave plot. Per NJ law, the property is now deemed a cemetery & is thus tax-exempt. I have read this a couple of times today. Wow..... could he go any lower?

[Orema]

Originally Posted by nhplowboi

Trump will be receiving a *tax-break* for Ivana’s golf course grave plot. Per NJ law, the property is now deemed a cemetery & is thus tax-exempt. I have read this a couple of times today. Wow..... could he go any lower?

Unfortunately, I think he can go lower, though I can't imagine how.

If nothing else, she was the former wife of a former President and she deserved more than this.

[Orema]

Newsom Asks Hollywood to Stop Filming in Conservative States

The California governor says film companies should “walk the walk” on abortion rights and L.G.B.T.Q. protections by leaving states such as Georgia and Oklahoma.


Gov. Gavin Newsom of California speaking at a news conference in Sacramento in June. Credit: Rich Pedroncelli/Associated Press

By Shawn Hubler for the New York Times

SACRAMENTO — Widening his attack on Republican states for their positions on guns, civil rights and abortion, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California on Wednesday called on Hollywood to “walk the walk” on liberal values by bringing back their film and television productions from states such as Georgia and Oklahoma.

Mr. Newsom issued the challenge through an ad in Variety that asked the state’s left-leaning creative community to “take stock of your values — and those of your employees — when doing business in those states.”

The Democratic governor on Wednesday simultaneously endorsed a legislative proposal that would provide a $1.65 billion, five-year extension of California’s film and television production tax credit program.

It marked the second time in recent weeks that Mr. Newsom has used California legislation as a cudgel to rip Republican leaders elsewhere. Last month, he signed a bill allowing residents to sue makers of illegal guns and took the opportunity to rebuke Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas for previously enabling its residents to sue abortion providers.

Mr. Newsom’s statements on Wednesday underscored the pressure that intensifying culture wars have placed on U.S. corporations, particularly in states where the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade has severely constrained reproductive rights for women.

Some of the country’s biggest businesses, including the Walt Disney Company, Netflix and Comcast, which owns NBCUniversal, have announced programs to help employees who need abortion access but cannot obtain it in their home states. Hundreds of entertainment figures also have denounced policies in Republican-led states that have weakened safeguards for L.G.B.T.Q. people. Last week, some 400 television creators and showrunners publicly demanded that production companies protect pregnant employees in states where abortion is outlawed.

But entertainment companies have not yet announced major plans to cancel expansions or relocate offices. “Tulsa King,” Taylor Sheridan’s upcoming crime drama starring Sylvester Stallone, has been filming this summer for

In Georgia on Monday, Gov. Brian Kemp announced that film and television productions generated $4.4 billion in the state this fiscal year, a new record. “Spider-Man: No Way Home” was filmed in the state, the governor noted, as was the fourth season of “Stranger Things.”


Supporters of Florida’s Republican-backed “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which bans classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity, demonstrating in Orlando, Fla., in April. Credit: Octavio Jones/Reuters

“I was happy to name Gavin Newsom Oklahoma’s Economic Developer of the Year Award in 2021 and I’m glad to see he’s making a run for two years in a row,” Gov. Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma joked in a statement on Wednesday. Mr. Stitt took a similar jab at the California governor last year in reference to the state’s pandemic shutdowns, which Mr. Stitt said drove business to his state.

The Motion Picture Association, the trade group representing major film studios and Netflix, declined to comment on Wednesday.

Moving a production can be exceptionally costly and logistically complex, and some of the entertainment industry’s biggest companies are deeply invested in states with conservative leaders. Disney, for example, has maintained extensive operations in Florida despite a bitter and expensive standoff between its employees and the state.

After Disney — pressured by its employees — opposed a Florida ban on L.G.B.T.Q.-related instruction, state legislators and Gov. Ron DeSantis stripped the company of the special authority it had over the swaths of land where Disney World and other company properties are located. Disney, meanwhile, has delayed a planned relocation of some 2,000 high-profile jobs from California to Florida.

Mr. Newsom has been in the thick of that power struggle for months, trolling Mr. DeSantis on Twitter and inviting Disney to rethink its Florida investments. The Variety ad was the latest in a series of initiatives by Mr. Newsom to take his defense of “California values” onto a national stage.

A $105,000 spot that ran in Florida last month — attacking Mr. DeSantis and inviting Florida businesses to come to California — was the opening salvo in a national effort by Mr. Newsom that has included newspaper ads in Texas attacking Mr. Abbott on abortion restrictions and a highly publicized trip to Washington, D.C., to discuss, among other things, gun legislation.


Gov. Ron DeSantis speaking about his policy plans and vision for the state in Palatka, Fla., in July. Credit: Lawren Simmons for The New York Times

In widening his attacks to include Oklahoma and Georgia, Mr. Newsom targeted not only two of California’s most aggressive rivals for film, television and other content production but two of the nation’s most conservative states on social issues.

Oklahoma, which aggressively ramped up film production incentives during the pandemic, has banned nearly all abortions since the Roe v. Wade reversal. And Georgia, which has one of the nation’s most generous packages of film production incentives, has granted fetuses full legal recognition. This week, a Georgia tax agency found that pregnant women could take a $3,000 personal tax exemption for any fetus with a detectable heartbeat.

Mr. Newsom noted that California’s abortion rights are among the most secure in the nation. The state has also enacted some of the nation’s toughest laws on gun safety and civil liberties for L.G.B.T.Q. people.

California’s film tax credit — which the state created in 2009 after productions began decamping for Canada — has been of debatable value, even with an expansion and overhaul in 2014. The incentive allows filmmakers to recoup as much as 25 percent of their spending — up to the first $100 million — on crew salaries and other costs, excluding star salaries. But other states, including Georgia, offer more significant rebates.

Critics complain that the tax credit encourages bidding wars and rarely keeps productions in the state over the long term. A 2019 analysis by the state’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office found that one-third of the projects that received the subsidies probably would have been made in California regardless.

“While the credit probably caused some film and television projects to be made here, many other similar projects also were made here without receiving any financial incentive,” the report said.

But Newsom on Wednesday touted another study, conducted this year for the Motion Picture Association by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp., that concluded that California’s program had helped create more than 110,000 jobs and tens of billions of dollars in economic output. In recent years, the tax credit has also helped bring shows such as “American Horror Story,” “Veep” and “Lucifer” back from other states and countries to California.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/03/u...on-states.html

[nhplowboi]

There you go Donald....one more kill to notch on your belt. All those lies you spew on your various platforms caught up another gullible follower to go out and defend your honor. Fortunately no innocent bystanders or responding officers were killed by this poor dupe during the ensuing chain of events.

[Kätzchen]

Just got through reading about Liz Cheney and how she is the political lefts latest darling because of how she sugar coats nothing and calls out bad choices/behaviors by members of her former political party.

I like her process.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/13/opini...nda/index.html