Betty Cracker

A foreign correspondent covering American madness for SkyNews corners Ted Cruz on lax gun laws. Cruz hysterically repeats NRA/GOP talking points, then scurries away:

"Why only in America?"

US Senator Ted Cruz walks away from @Stone_SkyNews after being asked if "this is the moment to reform gun laws" https://t.co/d2oBaP4KvW#TedCruz #America #Texasshooting #gunlaws pic.twitter.com/gL4TYeg04t

— Sky News (@SkyNews) May 26, 2022

Well done, Mr. Stone (the journalist).

This weekend’s NRA shindig is still on in Houston. Trump, Cruz, Abbott, et al., are still scheduled to speak. But one of the death merchants who previously reserved a booth has pulled out: Daniel Defense, maker of the battlefield weapon that killed the children and teachers in this week’s carnage. From The Daily Beast:

[I]n the aftermath of Tuesday’s slaughter in Uvalde, Daniel Defense, is no longer slated to join all the other profiteers of violent death at this weekend’s NRA convention in Houston…

The now $100-million-a-year company was founded by 59-year-old Marty Daniel of Georgia. He started out making garage doors after flunking out of Georgia Southern University twice before finally graduating. A company history on its website suggests he might not have gone into guns if he had been a better golfer.

“Daniel Defense got its start because Marty’s golf game sucked. He would spend most of his free time unwinding on the golf course, until the day a friend invited him to shoot his AR,” the story says. “Every shot he fired filled him with a satisfaction he’d never before experienced. Marty would purchase his first AR this same year.”

Emphasis mine. Maybe he should close up shop, get lots of intensive therapy and work on his fucking short game again.

Open thread — any topic.

PS: Anyone else wondering how a barely 18-year-old high school drop out who worked at Wendy’s was able to purchase two guns that cost about $2K each? Daniel Defense has a “buy now, pay later” option. Maybe that’s how.

Beto O’Rourke crashed Governor Abbott’s press conference in Uvalde, Texas today and dropped some truth bombs:

.@BetoORourke just showed up and shook things up. @statesman pic.twitter.com/Z1FtBwUEdJ

— Luz Moreno-Lozano 🦇 (@LuzMorenoLozano) May 25, 2022

They kicked him out, but he wasn’t done:

After getting booted, Beto went outside and kept going pic.twitter.com/2gCystHOr7

— Brandon Friedman (@BFriedmanDC) May 25, 2022

Go Beto.

Open thread.

A young poet sums it up in just two sentences:

It takes a monster to kill children. But to watch monsters kill children again and again and do nothing isn’t just insanity—it’s inhumanity.

— Amanda Gorman (@TheAmandaGorman) May 24, 2022

The U.S. Senate as currently configured is the obstacle to a solution, as usual. Pick your existential crisis — voting rights, women’s bodily autonomy, police reform, LGBTQ equality, climate change, tax reform, gun safety, whatever: the U.S. Senate is the cracked saucer where desperately needed legislation drains away.

Every Senate Republican will oppose doing anything to stop the next monster who will use a battlefield weapon to mow down schoolchildren, grocery shoppers, concert goers, movie viewers, etc. At least one but probably two Democrats will help them make sure nothing is done.

According to PawPaw Blacklung, letting a simple majority in the Senate pass legislation is “total insanity,” but apparently ongoing intolerable carnage is just the price we have to pay to maintain the glory that is the fucking filibuster.

Goddamn, I hate these people. All of them who refuse to address this, for whatever reason. I despise them jointly and severally.

This guy makes a good point:

Ten days ago it took the Senate about twenty minutes to unanimously pass a bill extending security protection to the family members of Supreme Court justices when it looked like a house might be picketed.

— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) May 25, 2022

Further, he said it’s all about which families are worth protecting, and he’s 100% correct. Brett Kavanaugh’s family is. The families in Uvalde, Texas aren’t. Yours and mine aren’t either.

I don’t know what to do with the anger and sadness anymore. Continue reading…

Some pundits seem mildly surprised that Mike Pence is stumping for Kemp in the Georgia GOP primary. That race is a proxy for Trump’s grudge match against Kemp, and Trump’s enmity toward Kemp is a proxy for Trump’s grudge match against the reality that he, Trump, is a losing loser who lost.

But is Pence’s defiance of Tangerine Baal in Georgia really surprising? Jonathan Martin in yesterday’s Times:

After four years of service bordering on subservience, the increasingly emboldened Mr. Pence is seeking to reintroduce himself to Republican voters ahead of a potential presidential bid by setting himself apart from what many in the G.O.P. see as the worst impulses of Mr. Trump. He’s among a small group in his party considering a run in 2024 no matter what Mr. Trump decides.

BORDERING on subservience? Pence steamed over that border and occupied the entire country of Subservientstan! He was the most obsequious toady in the history of servility!

And I think that’s why Pence is absolutely compelled to run again, even though Trump Republicans were baying for his blood on January 6 and it’s clear the party prefers loud-mouthed lib-owning authoritarians rather than the prim, Bible-humping variety. For Pence, it’s just too much to have endured that pride-swallowing nightmare for naught.

Pence simply cannot accept the fact that 4.5 years of starting every sentence with “Under President Trump’s exceptional leadership,” that all the ceaseless ass-kissing he lavished on a gross orange pervert was undone by one day’s adherence to the law. The smooth brain beneath the neatly clipped, fly-attracting white hair just cannot compute that fact. Pence is in denial.

Anyway, it couldn’t happen to a more deserving lickspittle, and I hope the forthcoming series of rejections causes severe psychological distress. Fuck that guy.

Also, there are some interesting primary races today. It looks like Georgia Republicans really will put a domestic-violence prone serial liar up against Senator Warnock. Will Hice prevail over Raffensperger, perhaps setting the stage for overturning fair elections in the future? Could be!

Will terrible Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey avoid a runoff? Maybe. Will Mo Brooks overcome Trump’s un-endorsement to prevail for the U.S. Senate race? That would be funny. Will felonious TX AG Ken Paxton finally put the desiccated Bush dynasty out of its misery?

The only race I’m personally invested in is Cuellar vs. Cisneros in the TX 28th. The anti-choice, possibly corrupt as fuck Cuellar is favored to win, but I hope Cisneros kicks his ass.

Which races are you watching? Open thread!

NYT columnist Tom Friedman had an off-the-record lunch with President Biden a week ago today. (Sounds like bad staff work to me.) Friedman damned Biden with faint praise by comparing his ability to pull together international support to GHWB’s. But Friedman came away from lunch fearful that we’re a Friedman Unit away from the abyss because of divisions at home:

Biden didn’t say it in so many words, but he didn’t have to. I could hear it between the lines: He’s worried that while he has reunited the West, he may not be able to reunite America.

It’s a legit fear. But then Friedman says this:

But with every passing day, every mass shooting, every racist dog whistle, every defund-the-police initiative, every nation-sundering Supreme Court ruling, every speaker run off a campus, every bogus claim of election fraud, I wonder if he can bring us back together. I wonder if it’s too late.

Emphasis mine to highlight the stupidity of the both-sides framing. On one side we have the Republican Party, which has morphed into an authoritarian cult whose powerful elected officials openly reject democracy, suppress votes, ban books, persecute vulnerable citizens, censor and/or punish protected speech, etc.

On the other, a party whose leaders explicitly rejected a poorly worded slogan that failed to gain traction beyond a handful of activists and backbenchers two years ago, and speaker controversies on college campuses. Friedman and other unfortunately influential elites are still equating these things, and that’s a big problem!

To defeat Trumpism we need only, say, 10 percent of Republicans to abandon their party and join with a center-left Biden, which is what he was elected to be and still is at heart. But we may not be able to get even 1 percent of Republicans to shift if far-left Democrats are seen as defining the party’s future.

Emphasis mine because that’s where Friedman tells on himself, with that passive language. Whose job is it to inform Americans about their society and government, to let them know what forces are driving and responding to events? A category that includes Friedman.

CPAC is in Hungary this year. Republicans are celebrating the demise of Hungarian democracy with the autocrat who smothered it, Viktor Orbán, and he, their guest of honor, told Republicans how to finish smothering democracy here in the U.S.

But on the other hand, 1) Ilhan Omar, and 2) some Yale students were rude to a Federalist Society speaker.

If the republic is saved, it will be in spite of people like Friedman, who, unfortunately, get invited to the White House for lunch.

Open thread.

Two items caught my attention on Twitter early this morning, and they’re sort of related. First, this truth bomb from Julia Ioffe:

I repeat: the only people who were fully prepared to cover the Trump presidency properly were people who knew how authoritarian regimes worked. The Washington press corps, which treats politics as something between a baseball game and a Broadway show, was woefully unprepared.

— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) May 20, 2022

There’s no excuse for how long most MSM outlets kept to the baseball/Broadway model. And I’ll believe they’re treating the ongoing threat to democracy as seriously as it warrants when the danger penetrates the skulls of more of their viewers.

But this NBC News story is a good start:

Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s top election official, faced an onslaught of threats after the 2020 presidential election for refusing to overturn results that showed Joe Biden had won the state. In those hectic weeks, she says she also received an especially disturbing piece of information: President Donald Trump suggested in a White House meeting that she should be arrested for treason and executed.

Benson, a Democrat, revealed the alleged remark for the first time in an interview with NBC News. She said she learned of it from a source familiar with Trump’s White House meeting.

The article doesn’t say when Benson learned of Trump’s remarks. I wonder if maybe someone saved that tidbit for a book, and Benson found out about it recently when asked to comment? Just speculating, but it doesn’t seem like something you’d keep under your hat.

Anyhoo, Benson is running for secretary of state again this year. Her Republican opponent is a Trump-endorsed delusional liar named Kristina Karamo, who claims the 2020 election was stolen and that Benson should go to jail. Karamo also has the endorsement of the Michigan GOP, so they’re cool with threatening to jail state officials for not stealing elections.

To NBC’s credit, the reporters call Trump’s lies about the 2020 election what they are — lies:

Since leaving office, Trump has continued to spread lies about the 2020 election despite audits in 39 states and more than 60 courts confirming the results. The messaging appears to be having an effect on the American public. NBC News’ most recent polling suggests that about 38 percent of voters across the country still believe the election was stolen.

The article also notes that Big Lie promoters who are running for key election posts “are on the ballot in 14 states, including the key battlegrounds of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Nevada.”

More reporting like this, please.

Also, did y’all know that Madison Cawthorn lost his primary race? Bring on the “Dark MAGA!”

Open thread.

ETA: Breaking from The Post:

Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, pressed Arizona lawmakers after the 2020 election to set aside Joe Biden’s popular-vote victory and choose “a clean slate of Electors,” according to emails obtained by The Washington Post…

The messages show that Thomas, a staunch supporter of Donald Trump, was more deeply involved in the effort to overturn Biden’s win than has been previously reported. In sending the emails, Thomas played a role in the extraordinary scheme to keep Trump in office by substituting the will of legislatures for the will of voters.

Thomas’s actions also underline concerns about potential conflicts of interest that her husband has already faced — and may face in the future — in deciding cases related to attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Those questions intensified in March, when The Post and CBS News obtained text messages that Thomas sent in late 2020 to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, pressing him to help reverse the election.

The coup-plotter’s husband should resign or be impeached.