heywood on 20/10/2021 at 19:58
Obvious narcissism aside, I think Trump deliberately tries to consume all the air in the room as a strategy.
You know how he's going to be all over the campaign trail next year trying to make the mid-terms all about him vs. Biden again.
It's hard to predict whether the party will stick with him all the way to the next Presidential primary. Depends on the outcome of next year's elections I suppose.
Cipheron on 20/10/2021 at 20:35
On that segueway, new politico article about Arizona candidates for next year:
(
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/20/arizona-gop-fringe-516322)
Quote:
As the party hardens around its fealty to former President Donald Trump, the GOP is filling up its midterm ballot with a roster of conspiracy theorists and extremists that could threaten the party's prospects in a state that's drifted leftward in recent elections.
The latest of those candidates is Ron Watkins, a celebrity in the QAnon conspiracy world suspected of being Q, who announced his plans to run for Congress last week.
It isn't just that Watkins embraces the baseless claim that the November election was stolen. It's that an entire ticket is running on that falsehood now. The state's congressional delegation features Rep. Paul Gosar, who spoke earlier this year at a conference organized by a white nationalist, and Rep. Andy Biggs, who falsely maintains “we don't know” who won the presidential election in Arizona.
State Rep. Mark Finchem, one of the chief proponents of the discredited post-election ballot review in Arizona, has been endorsed by Trump in his bid for secretary of state. And Kari Lake, the former TV anchor who has become a frontrunner for governor, still insists Trump carried the state and said recently that she would not have certified the 2020 election.
...
“The goalposts keep moving,” said Bill Gates, a Republican Maricopa County supervisor. “It used to be that we got into genuine debates about whether you're more of a conservative or a moderate. We used to debate over ideology. And now it is how far you can go down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. And if you're unwilling to do it, it doesn't matter if you're pro-life, if you've never voted for a tax increase. It doesn't matter. It's all about going deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole, unfortunately.”
I'm not sure this is can even be boiled down to a question of whether Republicans will even support or drop Trump any more. The real question right now is how much this surge actually eats away at the Republicans like a cancer and how much that mestatisizes to infecting the rest of America.
Nicker on 21/10/2021 at 12:39
The USA seems to be headed to a situation where either the great experiment will end or the GOP will die. Let's hope it is the latter.
Cipheron on 21/10/2021 at 15:03
(
www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2021/10/21/texas-lt-gov-dan-patrick-just-paid-his-first-voter-fraud-bounty-it-went-to-an-unlikely-recipient/)
Quote:
[Texas Lt. Gov. Dan] Patrick, a Republican, promised to pay $25,000 to any tipster who came forward with evidence of real voter fraud. He cut his first check this week.
...
Patrick's five-figure payout went to a progressive poll worker in Pennsylvania whose tip led to a single conviction of illegal voting by a registered Republican.
The unexpected outcome reveals the political dangers of cash bounties. With few strings attached, and more cases of alleged GOP voting fraud still in Pennsylvania courts, Patrick may be asked to shell out even more cash to his opponents.
Nicker on 21/10/2021 at 18:05
Hoist on his own petard.
Pyrian on 21/10/2021 at 18:27
I'm impressed he actually paid out.
Cipheron on 21/10/2021 at 20:37
His team probably figured it would be a bigger headline if he refused to pay out.
---
(
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/anti-vax-republican-lauren-witzke-is-recovering-from-covid-19-2021-10)
Quote:
Lauren Witzke, a self-styled “Christian nationalist” who embraced QAnon and support from white supremacists, was the Delaware GOP's candidate for Senate in 2020, receiving 186,000 votes in her failed run against Democratic incumbent Sen. Chris Coons.
In a post on Gab, a social network popular with right-wing extremists, Witzke claimed she was “recovering from this insane bio-weapon called Covid.” The 33-year-old, who has worked as a political commentator for the right-wing Christian conspiracy site TruNews, said she had decided not to tell anyone earlier so as not to alert “the shitlibs in the media.”
“This bio-weapon is demonic,” she wrote. “I've lost all of my senses and struggle with constant indifference, brain fog, and I've lost my joy.”
In posts shared on her Telegram channel, Witzke blamed TruNews for making her aware of the infection, insisting that
nasal swabs were ultimately responsible for her getting COVID-19. “I'm an idiot for submitting to their demands and getting tested,” she wrote, “and yes
I know I need a good husband in my life to keep me from making bad decisions.”
She left the company in September.
Prior to her departure, Witzke
attributed a June outbreak of COVID-19 among TruNews staff to a “demonic attack” for having hosted far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, a former Breitbart writer who now claims to be “ex-gay.”
“I don't think it's any coincidence that the TruNews crew all got deathly ill, got very sick, right after they brought Milo on,” she said, as reported by PinkNews.
Witzke currently works with Stew Peters, an online broadcaster who has repeatedly pushed false claims about vaccines. On his program, Witzke herself claimed that
COVID-19 vaccinations were a “mass death scale injection” that would precede the end of the world.
demagogue on 22/10/2021 at 03:13
Well he did paint himself into a corner by insisting it be a tip leading to a conviction. And the guy that did the fraud is making it sound like he was just a dottering old man that didn't know what he was doing & thought he could vote for his absent son, so kind of an "innocent" explanation. The way they can spin it is, Patrick is holding up his side of the bargain, paying out to legit cases, but the "real problem" is that the Dems are hiding their "massive fraud", how else can you explain all of those "millions of missing votes", while they are ganging up on poor dottering individual old men on the GOP side, but see, I'm fair, I held up my end of the deal anyway.
Or something like that. It probably doesn't even matter. The T loyalists are such low information voters, all they care about is that a pay-out was made. All he needs to show is that fraud was happening & the system wasn't stopping it: "the election was fraudulent", and they don't even need get to the part about which side it was on.
The moronic defense of T's blunders I see on comments, and the passion with which they push them, is so unreal to see. The one I saw this morning, some guy was going on & on insisting "Show me one example of Trump lying. You can't even tell me a single one!" Yeah. I don't know what planet that guy is living on, but there seems to be a lot of people squatting there. They just say TDS or "Orange Man Bad" and double-down on their defenses. What a dumb timeline we live in.
lowenz on 22/10/2021 at 09:37
Now that's payback :D
Starker on 22/10/2021 at 11:02
Lord Dampnut, not wanting to be outdone by the Taliban, announced a new social network called, and I'm not making this up, Truth.
As a sign of things to come, American Pravda already seems to draw controversy even before its launch:
Quote:
(
https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/donald-trump-true-social-launch-problems.html)
[...]
Truth Social will be a lot like Twitter, with the primary interface consisting of a feed of short posts from users you follow. However, these posts will be called “truths” instead of “tweets,” and reshares will be known a “retruths.” While the platform wasn’t supposed to have its soft launch until next month, users found a way to access the site and were setting up accounts within hours of the announcement. (One vandal claimed the @donaldjtrump handle and posted a picture of a pig with extremely large testicles.) Truth Social eventually cut off access, though screenshots of the interface taken before then suggest that the platform is basically just a fork of Mastodon, the open-access software that allows users to make spinoff social media networks. Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko has said that he will be seeking legal counsel since Truth Social appears to be breaking his product’s terms of use by not sharing the code or license with the public. Truth Social’s terms further claim that the source code is proprietary, which could also violate Mastodon’s license.
[...]