Category: Republican Reality

Oklahoma Governor Signs Law Granting Immunity for Drivers Who Kill Protesters

Republican Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt has signed a new law that would grant protections for drivers who hit and kill protesters while attempting to drive away from a protest and implements harsher penalties on people who block roads or highways during a protest. Democrats and activists decried the law as stifling protest and citizens’ First Amendment rights.

HB 1674, which Republican legislators passed earlier this week, grants civil and criminal immunity for drivers who “unintentionally” harm or kill protesters while “fleeing from a riot,” as long as there is a “reasonable belief that fleeing was necessary.”

“This legislation is not about safety,” said Nicole McAfee, director of policy and advocacy at the Oklahoma American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), in a statement. “It is about centering the convenience of people who already have the power and protections of the law. It is about responding to calls for transparency by protesters and the media with the criminalization of those transparency efforts.” Continue reading.

Howard Dean: The Republicans Are Now a Neo-Fascist Party

The former presidential candidate says the Republican Party has plunged into a “crazy” abyss of “whack jobs,” “autocrats,” and “nutjobs.”

The Republican Party has suffered a total moral collapse and is now held together by a bunch of “nutcases” happy to endorse autocracy and neo-fascism, according to Howard Dean, the former presidential candidate and ex-chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

The Democratic Party grandee tells Molly Jong-Fast he won’t run for office again, so he is no longer treading on eggshells, in a fiery edition of The New Abnormal.

Dean said there are still one or two decent Republicans in Washington, D.C. but they lack the backbone to stand up to the people who have taken over the party. Continue reading.

Tucker Carlson’s College Yearbook Entry Goes Viral, And It’s A Doozy

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The Fox News host affiliated himself with some eyebrow-raising groups.

Tucker Carlson’s college yearbook seemed to foretell plenty about the man whose bigotry would later fill the prime time airwaves on Fox News.

In a 1991 Trinity College yearbook entry now making the rounds on social media, Carlson wrote that he was part of the “Dan White Society.” News outlets presumed he was referring to the man who in 1978 murdered San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and city Supervisor Harvey Milk, California’s first openly gay elected official.

Carlson also affiliated himself with the Jesse Helms Foundation, named after North Carolina’s longtime anti-gay and anti-civil rights senator. Continue reading.

GOP Sen. Ron Johnson Criticizes ‘Big Push’ To Get Everyone Vaccinated

KEY FACTS

  • In an interview with conservative Wisconsin radio host Vicki McKenna, herself a vocal coronavirus vaccine skeptic, Johnson launched into a condemnation of “vaccine passports,” a credential that would allow businesses to verify vaccination status.
  • But Johnson also went a step further, declaring that he sees “no reason to be pushing vaccines on people,” arguing that their distribution should be “limited” to those most vulnerable to coronavirus, and asking, “If you have a vaccine, quite honestly, what do you care if your neighbor has one or not?”
  • Johnson said he is “getting highly suspicious” of the “big push to make sure everybody gets the vaccine,” not only stating it’s “not a fully approved vaccine” but also arguing that the fact it is 95% effective means only a limited number of people need to be vaccinated. Continue reading.

Evidence in Trump supporter’s trial suggests he espoused Nazi ideals

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NEW YORK — An impassioned supporter of former president Donald Trump, on trial for allegedly advocating the “slaughter” of influential Democrats after the U.S. Capitol riot, also espoused Nazi ideology and suggested to his father that Trump should override the election results and declare the United States a dictatorship as Adolf Hitler did in Germany generations ago, according to evidence presented by federal authorities in a Brooklyn courtroom Thursday.

Brendan Hunt, that evidence suggests, was fixated on extremist ideas and conspiracy theories — including that Democrats falsely portrayed covid-19 as a deadly epidemic to gain political advantage over Trump — when on Jan. 8 he posted a video titled “KILL YOUR SENATORS: Slaughter them all.”

Hunt’s trial is believed to be the first related to the insurrection since the Justice Department opened its sweeping investigation into the attack and the domestic-extremist threats suspected of fueling the bid by hundreds of Trump supporters to prevent Congress from counting the electoral college votes affirming his defeat. It is seen as a test of how far free speech can go before it violates constitutional protections. Continue reading.

Donald Trump Is Gone, But QAnon’s Sex Trafficking Conspiracies Are Here To Stay

After years of propaganda and misleading statistics, child sex trafficking conspiracies have become a gateway to right-wing extremism.

Christine Priola had worked in the Cleveland public school district for nearly 20 years when she resigned suddenly on Jan. 7, the day after she stormed the US Capitol, marching into the Senate chamber with a sign that said, “The children cry out for justice.”

“I will be switching paths to expose the global evil of human trafficking and pedophilia, including in our government and children’s services agencies,” she wrote in her resignation letter.

“This world is run on the blood of innocent children, please look into it,” she told a local news crew a few days later. Continue reading.

Arizona GOP lawmaker casually uses racist slur to describe Black voters

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Republican state Rep. Travis Grantham used the term while condemning a Democratic lawmaker who said the GOP’s voter suppression bill targets Black people.

A Republican state lawmaker in Arizona on Tuesday used the racist slur “colored people” to describe Black voters in the state.

State Rep. Travis Grantham used the language — which was prevalent in the racist, segregationist pre-Civil Rights South and has been considered inappropriate for decades — as he condemned a speech from state Rep. Reginald Bolding, a Black lawmaker who said a voter suppression bill that was being debated targets Black voters, among others.

“I feel personally that motives were arraigned of members, including myself, with regards to colored people, Black people, whatever people this individual wants to single out in their ability to vote, and I think it’s incorrect,” Grantham said, referring to Bolding, according to a video captured by Daily Kos Elections. Continue reading.

MN Senate passes public safety bill without DFL-backed police reform measures

Democrats say the bill doesn’t do enough to address police accountability.

The Republican-controlled Senate has passed a public safety omnibus bill without police reform measures. 

The public safety and judiciary funding bill that cleared the Senate on a 44-23 vote Thursday includes money for the court system, prisons and makes changes to sexual assault laws, including closing the “voluntary intoxication” loophole that was highlighted by a recent state Supreme Court decision. 

“Senate Republicans are committed to keeping Minnesotans safe and fully funding our public safety institutions,” Majority Leader Paul Gazelka, R-East Gull Lake, said in a statement. “This bill provides justice to victims and protects Minnesotans. I understand that Minnesota is in the spotlight. Last summer we passed several major reforms to police accountability, and we will look at additional reforms this session.  Continue reading.

Senator Latz pushes back on the canceled hearings for police reform

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Senator Ron Latz (DFL-Saint Louis Park), ranking DFL Lead on the Judiciary and Public Safety Committee releases the following statement in regards to the police reform hearings that Senate Republicans have promised to hold this session:

“Yesterday, the POST Board voted in favor of banning officers from serving who belong to extremist organizations including those groups espousing white supremacy. An amendment to do just that was defeated by Senate Republicans when offered to the Judiciary bill. Senate Republicans said they condemn white supremacists but wouldn’t vote to do so. Hate groups don’t get a say in our state. We must keep moving forward to enact reforms like the Minnesota POST Board did.

“Sen. Gazelka has now walked back on his promise to our citizens. Pushing the issue into a conference committee is a cop out: it will have limited participation and essentially cuts out a large contingent of Senators who deserve to be heard on these issues. Nevertheless, I continue to be ready to do the work we are elected to do and will do so in the conference committee as well.”

Liz Cheney vs. MAGA

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The Wyoming congresswoman challenged Republicans to turn away from Trump after Jan. 6. Instead, they turned on her.

The regular conference meetings of the Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives, held most weeks behind closed doors in the Capitol Visitor Center, tend to be predictable and thus irregularly attended affairs. The party leaders — the House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, the minority whip Steve Scalise and the conference chairwoman Liz Cheney, whose job it is to run these meetings — typically begin with a few housekeeping matters and then proceed with a discussion of the party’s message or issue du jour. The conference’s more voluble members line up at the microphone to opine for one to two minutes at a time; the rare newsworthy comment is often leaked and memorialized on Twitter seconds after it is uttered. An hour or so later, the members file out into the corridors of the Capitol and back to their offices, a few of them lingering to talk to reporters.

The conference meeting on the afternoon of Feb. 3 was different in nearly every way. It lasted four hours and nearly all of the G.O.P.’s 210 House members attended. Its stated purpose was to decide whether to remove Cheney from her leadership position.

Three weeks earlier, Cheney announced that she would vote to impeach President Donald Trump over his encouragement of his supporters’ storming the Capitol on Jan. 6 — one of only 10 House Republicans to do so and the only member of the party’s leadership. Because her colleagues had elected Cheney to the party’s third-highest position in the House, her words were generally seen as expressing the will of the conference, and those words had been extremely clear: “There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution,” she said. Continue reading.