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Category Archives: Republican Party

The Coming Campaign Season Will Be Worse Than We Imagine

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Regarding Trump’s eligibility to be POTUS per the 14th Amendment — Kate Riga at TPM has a rundown on what people are doing to get Trump declared ineligible. See also Protecting the Constitution from Trump by Gerard N. Magliocca at Washington Monthly. Although it’s a long shot to work, at the moment enough important people are taking it seriously that the ineligibility theory needs to be factored into the Republican nomination contest. Next year’s presidential elections are likely to be an even bigger chaotic nightmare than these things usually are.

Also at TPM, see The Plutocrats’ Low Energy Bark by Josh Marshall. Josh Marshall wonders why no alternative to Trump has broken out of the pack. “The only surprise to me is that there hasn’t been any coalescence behind a new guy, even as DeSantis’s campaign has become little more than a running joke,” he writes.

Along these lines, Chris Sununu, the Republican governor of New Hampshire and son of odious piece of slime John Sununu, whom I’m sure many of you remember, has an op ed in the New York Times. In this Sununu the Younger practically begs the GOP presidential candidates to stop tip-toeing around Trump and go after him. He is certain that Trump would not only lose the 2024 election but would be a disaster for other GOP candidates. “Every candidate with an (R) next to their name, from school board to the statehouse, will be left to answer for the electoral albatross at the top of the ticket,” he writes. And he thinks Trump is beatable, not just in the general but in the primaries as well.

The headlines tell us that Trump’s lead over the other candidates is growing. But to continue Sununu’s argument, this is partly because the “other” votes are being broken up among so many other candidates. “After the results from Iowa come in, it is paramount that the field must shrink, before the New Hampshire primary, to the top three or four,” Sununu writes. Candidates who stay in the race who have no viable way to win need to be called out.

The Republican base makes no sense to me. I’m not going to predict that some not-Trump candidate can somehow catch fire and challenge His Orangeness, or which one that might be.

And if Trump realizes he has a genuine rival for the nomination, there could be a literal bloodbath. Trump is fighting for his life. He’ll stop at nothing to get his way.

Dems Go on Offense. Republicans Bay at the Moon.

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The nutjob “fair tax“ that would eliminate the IRS and impose a 30 percent tax on all retail sales has been introduced to the House before. This Wikipedia page says it’s been introduced “regularly” since 2005, but it’s never made it out of committee. This was true even when Republicans had a big majority in the House. Now it’s in committee again, What’s different is that in years past no one talked about it much. Now Democrats are talking about it, a lot.

“Democrats are seizing on a Republican proposal to impose a national sales tax and abolish the Internal Revenue Service as a cudgel against the GOP, even though the bill has few fans even among Republican lawmakers,” WaPo says. Even the patriarch of tax nutjobbery, Grover Norquist, is calling the fair tax bill a “gift to Democrats.”

Of course, even if the House passed the thing it would die in the Senate and would never be signed by President Biden. It doubt it has any better chance in the House now than it’s had in the past. The point is that the Dems are going on offense for a change. This is a good thing. More of this, please.

Trump’s Facebook and Twitter suspensions have ended. I don’t know if he’s written anything on those platforms yet. If he does, I question whether it will work for him as it has in the past. Charlie Cooke — yeah, I know, it’s Charlie Cooke — has a takedown of Trump on National Review that’s actually worth reading. You will laugh.

There was a point in time at which Trump’s unusual verbal affect and singular nose for underutilized wedge issues gave him a competitive edge. Now? Now, he’s morphing into one of the three witches from Macbeth. To peruse Trump’s account on Truth Social is to meet a cast of characters about whom nobody who lives beyond the Trump Extended Universe could possibly care one whit. … safely ensconced within his own macrocosm, Trump is busy mainlining Edward Lear. Day in, day out, he rambles about the adventures of Coco Chow and the Old Broken Crow; the dastardly Unselect Committee; the (presumably tasty) Stollen Presidential Election; the travails of that famous law-enforcement agency, the Gestopo; Joe Scarborough’s wife “Mike”; and other unusual characters from Coromandel. “Where the early pumpkins blow / In the middle of the woods / Lived the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò / Who STOLLE THE ELECTION / Don’t you know?” …

… Throughout his public career, Trump has resembled nothing so much as a drunken talk-radio caller from Queens, and, on Truth Social, readers get the treat of watching him at the zenith of his rhetorical powers.

Recently Trump declared himself the winner of a golf tournament at his West Palm Beach golf club, even though he hadn’t played the entire tournament. Not that his head was ever screwed on all the way, but I wonder if he’s getting worse.

Now three good people have announced they are running for Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat in 2024. These are Adam Schiff, Barbara Lee, and Katie Porter. We need them all in Washington. I understand Feinstein has said she won’t decide about 2024 until 2024. She will be 91 years old in 2024. Someone close to her really needs to tell her to retire.

A letter writer to Talking Points Memo asks people not to throw money at the Senate primary candidates in California too soon. That seat will be won by a Democrat, no matter what. Unlike in 2022, Democrats are defending a lot of Senate seats next year. It’s going to be hard for them to keep the Senate. It doesn’t make sense to throw hundreds of millions of dollars into the California Senate race when those dollars are needed elsewhere.

Debt ceiling updates. Roll Call reports that the House GOP may be wanting to buy themselves more time on the debt ceiling.

House Republicans are mulling an attempt to buy time for further negotiations on federal spending and deficits by passing one or more short-term suspensions of the statutory debt ceiling this summer, including potentially lining up the deadline with the end of the fiscal year Sept. 30. …

… Any such short-term measure would likely be “clean” of any strings attached or specific spending cuts, and be designed as a suspension of the borrowing cap, which had been done repeatedly over the past decade until 2021, rather than a dollar increase in the debt limit. That would presumably make it easier for Republicans to swallow voting for it after pledging to only back a debt limit increase if paired with spending cuts.

However, as Steve Benen wrote yesterday, it’s apparent a lot of House Republicans still don’t understand what the debt ceiling is. Several of them recently have made public statements that linked the debt ceiling to government shutdowns. And, of course, shutdowns are what happens when Congress fails to pass budget legislation with the necessary appropriations. The debt ceiling is something else.

Also yesterday, WaPo reported that House GOP leadership is “embarking on an education campaign to make sure their members understand how the debt limit works, the consequences of failing to raise the ceiling, and the difference between a garden-variety government shutdown and a potential debt default.” Good luck with that, peeps.

Today’s News Bits: Republican Machinations

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First, let’s take a moment to remember David Crosby.

Sigh. Okay, on to the news …

Yesterday U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks slapped Trump and his lawyer with nearly $1 million in court-imposed sanctions for filing a frivolous lawsuit. Trump sued a bunch of people (see chart) claiming they all conspired to smear him with the false narrative that his 2016 presidential campaign was colluding with Russia. Which I still say wasn’t false.

Trump and and his lawyer are jointly and severally liable for the total amount of sanctions the judge imposed to cover the defendants’ legal fees and costs, which comes to $937,989.39. From the judge’s decision:

This case should never have been brought. Its inadequacy as a legal claim was evident from the start. No reasonable lawyer would have filed it. Intended for a political purpose, none of the counts of the amended complaint stated a cognizable legal claim. …

…Thirty-one individuals and entities were needlessly harmed in order to dishonestly advance a political narrative. A continuing pattern of misuse of the courts by Mr. Trump and his lawyers undermines the rule of law, portrays judges as partisans, and diverts resources from those who have suffered actual legal harm. …

… Mr. Trump is a prolific and sophisticated litigant who is repeatedly using the courts to seek revenge on political adversaries. He is the mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process, and he cannot be seen as a litigant blindly following the advice of a lawyer. He knew full well the impact of his actions. … As such, I find that sanctions should be imposed upon Mr. Trump and his lead counsel, Ms. Habba.

Regarding the alleged investigation of the “leak” of the Dobbs decision, late yesterday it was admitted that none of the justices were questioned. Chief Justice Roberts had the Marshal, a lady with an administrative position who has never investigated anything in her life, run the investigation. Could it be that the Chief Justice didn’t want us to know who the leaker is? Now the House Judiciary Committee (Gym Jordan, chair) is saying it will investigate the leak. Gym might get a friendly memo from the Chief Justice saying to cool it.

Other stuff to read: Paul Krugman on not negotiating with terrorists; Greg Sargent on how blue states can show the way out of red state culture war madness.

Endless Insanity in the New GOP House

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My “congressman,” Jason Smith, was not one of the 20 or so nutjobs who held out against Kevin McCarthy in the speaker vote debacle. Smith was a pro-McCarthy nutjob. Yet he somehow got the chair of the Ways and Means Committee. I can promise you that no good will come of that, unless it’s to utterly bleep up the House Republicans somehow.

For example, Semafor is reporting that McCarthy may have promised the House nutjob fringe that he would allow the House to vote on a “fair tax” proposal, which I believe is the kind of thing that would have to go through Ways and Means.

As part of his deal to become House speaker, Kevin McCarthy reportedly promised his party’s conservative hardliners a vote on legislation that would scrap the entire American tax code and replace it with a jumbo-sized national sales tax. …

…The idea of a “fair tax” that would replace our current IRS code with a single sales tax was popularized on conservative talk radio in the late 1990s. It has kicked around Washington ever since, popping up in the occasional presidential platform, but never received a vote.

Its current champion in Congress is Georgia Rep. Earl “Buddy” Carter, whose Fair Tax Act would swap out the income, payroll, estate, and corporate levies for a 30% national sales tax. It would also send out “prebate” checks to soften the blow on lower income families, all while abolishing the Internal Revenue Service.

If people don’t like inflation, how are they going to feel about a 30 percent sales tax? I can’t imagine this has a serious chance of passing in the House, since I’m sure there are at least some Republicans who realize that this would not be a popular thing if it went into effect. And it wouldn’t have a chance in the Senate. Still, just the fact that some of the House nutjobs take this nonsense seriously says something. Where Jason Smith stands on this issue, I do not know. Smith does want to privatize Social Security, so he can’t be counted on to support anything sensible.

But one thing I do know, is that Rep. Vern Buchanan of Florida is really pissed at McCarthy now.

As I wrote last week, Republicans have been fixated on whether 71-year-old Rep. Vern Buchanan might retire from Congress after losing the House Ways & Means chairmanship to the 42-year-old Speaker’s pet Jason Smith, potentially reducing Kevin McCarthy’s margin of error from four votes to three to pass critical partisan legislation. (If McCarthy somehow loses fabulist George Santos, too, he could be held hostage by as few as two members of his already fractious House conference.) Vern’s people say he won’t retire (despite the rumblings on the Hill), but they didn’t deny that he was mighty pissed to be passed over as the most senior person on the Ways & Means committee by Smith, a member who was fifth in line.

Just how angry was he? Well, a source on the House floor during the vote told me that while McCarthy was gaveling down the votes, Buchanan walked up to McCarthy and said, “You fucked me, I know it was you, you whipped against me.” He then proceeded to chew out McCarthy’s deputy chief of staff for floor operations, John Leganski. It was shocking to see such fury from Buchanan, who’s known for being mild mannered. Indeed, I heard that the tirade was so heated that the Speaker’s security detail stepped in with a light touch. (McCarthy’s spokesperson Matt Sparks disputed this detail saying, “at no point did anyone have to step in.” A spokesperson for Buchanan declined to comment.)

McCarthy got the speaker’s gavel, but how long will he be allowed to keep it?

Note also that Marjorie Taylor Green, Paul Gosar, and Lauren Boebert are now all on the Oversight Committee. James Comer, who is eager to investigate President Biden on the documents issue but thinks Trump has earned a pass, is chair. I suspect the new Oversight Committee will be looking a lot like the old House Un-American Activities Committee in no time.

In other news, Greg Sargent writes that Biden just outmaneuvered MAGA Republicans — and they barely noticed.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas unveiled an initiative on Friday that would extend more protection against deportation to undocumented immigrants who report labor rights violations by employers.

This is a big move by the administration, one long sought by immigration advocates. Biden’s immigration record is decidedly mixed, but this would address a serious problem: Undocumented migrant workers often fear reporting workplace violations — ones they were victims of or just witnessed — because it could lead to their deportation.

Now they will have improved access to a legal process that can defer their deportations for two years and potentially extend them work permits. The hope: To encourage them not just to report unsafe or exploitative working conditions, but also to cooperate with ongoing Labor Department investigations, improving working standards for all workers.

So far, Sargent continues, the anti-immigrant Right hasn’t paid much notice to this policy change. To come out against it they’d have to come out in support of predatory employers. Well, they’ve done worse.

See also Josh Marshall, Trump’s Disappearing, and He Knows It.

Zelensky, Trump’s Taxes, and the J6 Report

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Big day today. As I write this President Zelensky is either somewhere over the Atlantic or close to arriving in Washington already, I understand. I’m sure he realizes that once Republicans take the majority in the House, military aid from the U.S. will likely dry up. But he will address Congress and do his best to open right-wing eyes.

And yesterday we pretty much got the Holy Grail, also known as Trump’s taxes. They’ll be released as soon as some personal information like people’s Social Security numbers have been redacted. But what’s come out so far is that the IRS failed to do its duty to audit Trump’s taxes while he was in office (yet chose to do “deep audits” of Andrew McCabe and James Comey). Further, it appears Trump made all kinds of claims of deductions and write-offs and losses and values without providing any documentation. One suspects he just pulled numbers out of his ass.

Susanne Craig of the New York Times commented yesterday,

I’ve long felt Donald Trump didn’t want his tax return information released because it exposes him as a wildly unsuccessful businessman. In 2019, we obtained a printout of Trump’s official Internal Revenue Service tax transcripts from 1985 to 1994, when Trump lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer. That’s right — more money than any other individual in the country. We were able to establish this by comparing his results for those years with detailed information the I.R.S. compiles on an annual sampling of high-income earners.

And one suspects he’s been fudging numbers on his tax returns for years to keep himself financially afloat. A real audit could ruin him. Anyone got popcorn?

And the January 6 committee’s final report is supposed to be released today. Possibly the best news is that we learned yesterday that the committee had already been cooperating with and sending documents to special prosecutor Jack Smith.

Enjoy the moment. I’m not hearing any reports on how Trump is handling all this, but here is a good guess.

DoD, Cuccinelli, Alex Jones: Text News

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Too much is happening all at once. It’s hard to keep up.

This week CNN reported, “The Defense Department wiped the phones of top departing DOD and Army officials at the end of the Trump administration, deleting any texts from key witnesses to events surrounding the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, according to court filings.”

The departing officials included former acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller, former chief of staff Kash Patel, and former Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy. It doesn’t sound as if these people deleted anything from their government-issued phones when they left the DoD; rather, the DoD wiped the phones without making backups first when they were turned in, the article says.

But I do remember that Miller and Patel were part of the plan to replace as many key officials as possible with Trump loyalists in the closing days of the Trump Administration. Miller was acting SecDef from November 9, 2020 to January 20, 2021. He replaced Mark Esper, whom Trump fired on November 9. This was just two days after the 2020 election had been called for Joe Biden. Shortly after that, Kash Patel was named Miller’s chief of staff.

By then, the fake elector plot already was taking shape. (McCarthy was Secretary of the Army from September 2019 to January 20, 2021, so his appointment probably wasn’t connected to the election overturning scheme.)

Note also that both Miller and Patel were accused of blocking cooperation with the Biden transition team.

Also, “Miller, Patel and McCarthy have all been viewed as crucial witnesses for understanding government’s response to the January 6 Capitol assault and former President Donald Trump’s reaction to the breach. All three were involved in the Defense Department’s response to sending National Guard troops to the US Capitol as the riot was unfolding,” CNN reported. This is a part of the January 6 picture that hasn’t been much addressed so far.

A few days ago it was reported that text messages of acting homeland security secretary Chad Wolf and acting deputy secretary Ken Cuccinelli were missing also. You might remember Chad Wolf’s unconstitutional activities in Portland, summer 2020.

And now Cuccinelli has been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury regarding January 6. Cuccinelli strikes me as a guy who would like to just walk away from the mess that is Trump. He’d probably rather not denounce Trump, but I doubt he’s going to take any bullets for him, either.

I’m looking forward to the second season of the January 6 committee hearings. It could be even better than the first season.

Much hilarity ensued yesterday at Alex Jones’s trial when it was revealed Jones’s lawyer accidentally had sent all of his text messages to the prosecuting attorneys. It amounted to several hundred gigabytes of material that revealed a lot of deceptions and withholding of evidence on Jones’s part.

Jones is so screwed. His attorney asked for a mistrial this morning; the judge promptly denied it. This judge is all out of bleeps, I believe. For more on that, see Alex Jones Can’t Pretend His Way Out of This Reality by Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic.

Update: The January 6 committee wants Alex Jones’s texts.

In other news — the Senate voted to allow Sweden and Finland to join NATO. This was a near-unanimous vote. The only holdout was Josh Hawley, who says we can’t waste time on NATO because China is bad. Yeah, he just wanted to draw attention to himself. Before the vote Mitch McConnell addressed the senators and basically advised them that voting against the admissions would be an extremely stupid move, and I guess everybody but Hawley heard him.

No End to the Crazy in Texas

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Get a load of this headline —

They keep promising they’ll go, but they never do it, the jerks. How can we miss you if you won’t go away?

This happened at the recent Texas Republican state convention, which sounds like it was an even bigger clown show than the seemngly multiannual CPAC conference.

Among other things, a bunch of MAGA-head Proud Boy types got into the conference and heckled Rep. Dan Crenshaw as a “globalist RINO” and “eyepatch McCain.” I understad the latter taunt originated with Tucker Carlson after Crenshaw  visited Ukraine.

Crenshaw always seemed a typical hard-right wackjob to me. The “globalist RINO” charge came from an allegation that Crenshaw had something to do with the World Economic Forum, although I don’t know exactly what. He also was accused of supporting red flag laws, although he says that is not his position now. But somehow he is suddenly persona non grata among the insurrectionist set.

Back to the Texas GOP conference — along with calling for a secession referendum of some sort to appear on ballots in 2023, the conference appears to have approved the following:

  • A resolution rejecting the result of the 2020 presidential election and calling Joe Biden an “illegitimate president.”
  • A resolution calling for the complete repeal of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
  • A party platform calling homosexuality “an abnormal lifestyle choice.” Also the Log Cabin Republicans, which represents gay Republicans, was blocked from having a booth at the conference.
  • Another part of the platform called for teaching schoolchildren about “the humanity of the preborn child,”
  • Delegates adopted a formal “rebuke” of Sen. John Cornyn for engaging in bipartisan gun control talks. Cornyn was booed when he tried to give a speech explaining the talks.

This is all reminding me of a particularly creepy Twilight Zone episode. No one is allowed to disagree with the demon child. Except now there are a lot of demon children.

Going back to the Newsweek article and the secession resolution —

Under a section titled “State Sovereignty,” the platform states: “Pursuant to Article 1, Section 1, of the Texas Constitution, the federal government has impaired our right of local self-government. Therefore, federally mandated legislation that infringes upon the 10th Amendment rights of Texas should be ignored, opposed, refused, and nullified.

I hope they all understand that if Texas secedes, Texas citizens will forfeit all connection to Social Security and Medicare.

“Texas retains the right to secede from the United States, and the Texas Legislature should be called upon to pass a referendum consistent thereto.”

So Texans just want to declare they have a right so secede (they don’t), not that they’re actually going to secede. Do stop being such a tease, Texas.

In related news: Former Missouri governor Eric Greitens, currently the Republican front runner for Roy Blunt’s Senate seat, has released an ad so irresponsible and offensive that it was banned from Facebook. So let’s see it!

Yeah, he’s telling his followers to go RINO hunting. I assume he’s referring to his GOP political opposition, none of whom strike me as all that RINO-ish. They’re all verious degrees of MAGA. Unfortunately. Maybe former Navy SEAL Greitens will go hunting for former Navy SEAL Dan Crenshaw.

Seriously, this is not sustainable. At some point the only way left for them to up the ante will be to really start shooting each other.

The Long Overdue Gateway Pundit Lawsuit

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The right-wing site Gateway Pundit is being sued. About time.

I’ve cited Gateway Pundit and its founder, Jim Hoft, many times over the years. GP is the place to go if you’re itching for the latest news on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Yeah, that’s still a thing. Hoft is a variation of Alex Jones, but dumber. See, for example, When Being an Obama Supporter Is Unacceptable from 2012.

News of the suit caused me to check out current headlines. Here’s a juicy one — Biden’s DOJ Releases Memo that Totally Blows Away the ‘Trump Incited an Insurrection’ Narrative. Wow, that would be a big deal. Amazing no one else is reporting on it.

So what does this memo say? This sentence —

“It is objectively unreasonable to conclude that President Trump could authorize citizens to interfere with the Electoral College proceedings…”

See? Trump couldn’t have done it. Of course, what the document is saying is that Trump had no authority to tell people to march to the Capitol and interfere with the election, not that he didn’t tell people to march to the Capitol and interfere with the election. Truly, it’s for good reason that Hoft has long been known as the Dumbest Man on the Internet.

The suit was filed by two Georgia election workers — Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss — who were singled out by Hoft and accused of stuffing ballot boxes with fake ballots for Biden. The New York Times reported,

Ms. Moss, who continues to work for the Fulton County elections board, and Ms. Freeman, a temporary employee during the 2020 election, were ensnared by the Trump-supporting media and Mr. Trump himself after Gateway Pundit published dozens of false stories about them, starting last December and continuing through this November. The stories called the two women “crooked Democrats” and claimed that they “pulled out suitcases full of ballots and began counting those ballots without election monitors in the room.”

Investigations conducted by the Georgia secretary of state’s office found that the two women did nothing wrong and were legally counting ballots.

For example, here is one of Hoft’s stories, from December 2, 2020. What’s Up, Ruby?… BREAKING: Crooked Operative Filmed Pulling Out Suitcases of Ballots in Georgia IS IDENTIFIED. This is classic Hoft. The post is illustrated with fuzzy photos that have been doctored with circles and arrows. The text tells you that photos show you ballots being manipulated. But in truth, without the captions you wouldn’t know what was going on in the photos. Well, with the captions you still don’t know what’s going on in the photos.

Reuters has a special report about this incident and what came next — Trump campaign demonized two Georgia election workers – and death threats followed. It’s not clear whether the story about the fake ballots originated with Hoft or somewhere else. It might have originated with the Trump campaign, which fed the story to Hoft. But Ruby Freeman’s name was soon all over right-wing media. Trump himself referred to Ms. Freeman several times in his infamous call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which Trump said, “I just want to find 11,780 votes.”

Predictably, MAGA thugs began to terrorize Freeman and Moss, who are black. From Reuters —

Freeman made a series of 911 emergency calls in the days after she was publicly identified in early December by the president’s camp. In a Dec. 4 call, she told the dispatcher she’d gotten a flood of “threats and phone calls and racial slurs,” adding: “It’s scary because they’re saying stuff like, ‘We’re coming to get you. We are coming to get you.’”

Two days later, a panicked Freeman called 911 again, after hearing loud banging on her door just before 10 p.m. Strangers had come the night before, too. She begged the dispatcher for assistance. “Lord Jesus, where’s the police?” she asked, according to the recording, obtained by Reuters in a records request. “I don’t know who keeps coming to my door.”

“Please help me.”

Freeman quit her temporary election gig. Moss took time off amid the tumult. The 37-year-old election worker, known for her distinctive blonde braids, changed her appearance. Moss often avoided going out in public after her phone number was widely circulated online. Trump supporters threatened Moss’s teenage son by phone in tirades laced with racial slurs, said her supervisor, Fulton County Elections Director Richard Barron. …

…Their modest incomes left the two women with little power to defend themselves against the billionaire president and his legions of backers. After Freeman went into hiding, she initially stayed with friends. They soon asked her to leave, fearing for their own security, so she moved from one Airbnb to another, never staying in one place for too long, said a person with direct knowledge of her movements. Freeman went to great lengths to conceal her identity and location, the person said. She stopped using credit cards and started using a system for electronic money transfers that caters to people wanting to keep a low profile, the person said.

The constant threats so terrified the two women that they did not return calls from Fulton County District Attorney’s Office investigators who wanted to talk to them this summer as part of their probe into whether Trump illegally interfered with Georgia’s 2020 election, Barron said. “They wouldn’t even answer the phone,” he said.

See also Raw Story, ‘You should be hung!’ How Trump supporters drove two Georgia election workers into hiding.

This is horrible. These women must have been scared out of their wits, for good reason. This is how black people in Georgia end up dead. But Hoft shows no remorse. Yesterday he ran an article headlined Interesting. FBI Investigated Alleged Threats to Ruby Freeman but There Is No Record of FBI Investigating the Illicit Late Night Actions at State Farm Center.

We know there was no ballot-box stuffing; Georgia re-counted the ballots three bleeping times, three bleeping ways. Trump lost every time. Election officials in Georgia, including Republican officials, keep verifying that Freeman and Moss did nothing wrong. What you see in (not manipulated) videos and photos is what ballot counting looks like.

Ruby Freeman used have a small business selling ladies accessories from a kiosk at a mall, but that had to be closed. I wish Freeman and Moss all the best with their suit, which seems strong to me, and hope Jim Hoft gets taken to the cleaners. A whole lot of right-wing sites that have demonized and doxxed innocent people over the years need to learn there are consequences for causing harm.

See also:

Ben Collins, We need to learn how to talk to (and about) accidental conspiracists

ATLANTA, GA – NOVEMBER 04: Election workers count Fulton County ballots at State Farm Arena on November 4, 2020 in Atlanta, Georgia. The 2020 presidential race between incumbent U.S. President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden is still too close to call with outstanding ballots to count. (Photo by Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)

Sen. Josh Hawley Is a Pathetic Weenie

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Great bit of work from Chris Hayes’s show last night.

What makes Hawley even more pathetic is that back on January 4 — an auspicious date, come to think of it — Hawley had a meltdown over protesters outside his home. The Associated Press reported,

Protesters who gathered outside the Virginia home of Republican Sen. Josh Hawley Monday evening were peaceful and they left when police explained they were violating local picketing laws, police said Tuesday. The Missouri senator on Twitter accused the protesters of vandalism and threatening his family.

Officers were called to Hawley’s home in Vienna, a Washington suburb, around 7:45 p.m. after someone reported that there were “people protesting in front of the house.” Officers who responded to the scene found that the “people were peaceful,” said Master Police Officer Juan Vazquez, a spokesman for the Town of Vienna Police Department.

The demonstrators said they went to Hawley’s home because he said he would object when Congress convenes Wednesday to affirm Joe Biden’s election victory.

Vazquez said the protesters had been violating several laws, including a Virginia code about picketing in front of a house, a town ordinance about making noise in front of a home and a littering code. But he said the officers explained the violations and “everyone just left.”

“There were no issues, no arrests,” he said. “We didn’t think it was that big of a deal.”

Hawley accused the group of threatening his family.

“Tonight while I was in Missouri, Antifa scumbags came to our place in DC and threatened my wife and newborn daughter, who can’t travel,” Hawley wrote on Twitter. “They screamed threats, vandalized, and tried to pound open our door. Let me be clear: My family & I will not be intimidated by leftwing violence.”

In short, Hawley is a pathetic weenie in a tightly taylored weenie suit.

And, of course, we all remember this proud moment in the life of the Missouri freshman senator, just two days later:

Unlike some other senators — Rand Paul and Ron Johnson come to mind — Hawley isn’t stupid. He’s a moral and ethical vaccuum with the integrity of sawdust, but he’s not stupid. This is calculated. He thinks that acting like a right-wing jerkwad will make him president some day. If he destroys the United States in the process, that’s just collateral damage to him.

He’ll never be POTUS — I prayerfully hope — but he may be a senator from Missouri for a long time, alas. This sort of crap sells around here. I’m beginning to think Anheuser-Busch products are rotting people’s brains.