What are Republicans doing these days?

[hiphopfroggy]

Seeing as how there is an ongoing thread to keep tabs on what the Democrats are doing, it seems the pit could use some balancing out to do the same with the Republican party.

So, are republicans these days serving their constituents or serving themselves?

Top Texas Republicans on the ropes after tone-deaf storm response
The swaggering, Texas brand of free-market governance that’s central to the state’s political identity is taking a beating.


The brutal winter storm that turned Texas roads to ice, burst pipes across the state and left millions of residents shivering and without power has also damaged the reputations of three of the state’s leading Republicans.

Sen. Ted Cruz was discovered to have slipped off to Mexico on Wednesday night, only to announce his return when he was caught in the act. Gov. Greg Abbott came under fire over his leadership and misleading claims about the causes of the power outages. And former Gov. Rick Perry suggested Texans preferred power failures to federal regulation, a callous note in a moment of widespread suffering.

It’s more than just a public relations crisis for the three politicians. The storm has also battered the swaggering, Texas brand of free-market governance that’s central to the state’s political identity on the national stage.

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/02/19/texas-storm-response-cruz-abbott-perry-470109

 

[hiphopfroggy]

Texas disaster exposes what happens when Republicans replace governance with trolling
Republicans have mastered the art of breaking government and telling voters it's because government can't work

By any reasonable standard, the disaster in Texas, as winter storms break the backbone of basic utility services and leave millions to suffer, should be the death knell for conservative ideology. It's evidence of how wrong Republicans are on two of their most important beliefs: That climate change is a hoax best ignored and that government disinvestment and deregulation will magically lead to better services as the private sector fills in the gaps. And as many progressive analysts, energy experts, climate scientists, and Democratic politicians have been pointing out, the catastrophe in Texas proves that the U.S. government needs to move swiftly on two fronts that Republicans hate, climate change mitigation and public sector investment in infrastructure.

https://www.salon.com/2021/02/19/te...republicans-replace-governance-with-trolling/

 

[hiphopfroggy]

Expulsion is the only remedy: Insurrectionists in Congress must be rooted out
Republicans in Congress have doubled down on Trump's attempted coup. If we tolerate that, it will happen again





We fight like hell and if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore."

These were the words of then-President Donald Trump as he addressed a large, hostile crowd in front of the White House on Jan. 6, 2021.

It has now been more than a month since Trump and his congressional allies incited and supported the insurrection against our country's democracy. It was an attempt by a mob of violent seditionists to attack the Capitol and stop Congress from affirming the Electoral College victory of Joe Biden. This was planned and orchestrated by the sitting president with the hope that he could remain in power against the will of the people. Five people died. Dozens of police officers were injured. Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi were in grave danger of being seized and murdered. It was an unimaginable and indescribable scene of terror. Many of the insurrectionists had tactical gear and communications equipment. They roamed the halls with zip ties hunting for Pence and Pelosi. They built gallows and chanted death threats. They beat a police officer with a pole bearing the U.S. flag. And let us not forget that President Trump chose not to intervene when the violence began. With the resources at his disposal, he easily and rapidly could have.

Never in our 245-year history has our democracy been actively sabotaged by a sitting president and his congressional sycophants. The events of Jan. 6, 2021 will be highlighted in all history books going forward. The insurrection of our election will never be forgotten. Its significance is on par with Sept. 11, 2001, and Dec. 7, 1941 (Pearl Harbor Day).



https://www.salon.com/2021/02/09/ex...urrectionists-in-congress-must-be-rooted-out/

 

[TxFrog1999]

Pretty good examples of self fulfilling narratives.

 

[LVH]

You wouldnt be making these posts unless you were upset about something.

I am guessing you are upset that the Biden administration has been an abject failure so far.

Remember when Biden said he'd defeat COVID in 100 days? Well, now his "medical experts" are saying things may not go back to normal until Spring 2022.

Lots of people voted for your guy Biden because they believed the false narrative that Trump handled COVID horribly and if we just elected Biden it would be quickly fixed and we could go back to normal quickly.

 

[gohornedfrogs]

Pretty good examples of self fulfilling narratives.

And projection.

 

[hiphopfroggy]

 

[hiphopfroggy]

 

[gohornedfrogs]

LOL. Jr. is talking about Democratic Governor Cuomo.

Talk about self-owns.

 

[hiphopfroggy]

The Virginia G.O.P. Voted on Its Future. The Losers Reject the Results.
In a sign of the Trump era’s lingering alternate realities, Republicans in the struggling state party are refusing to move forward with a new system for choosing nominees.



ARLINGTON, Va. — The Republican Party of Virginia has voted four times since December to nominate its candidates for this year’s statewide races at a convention instead of in a primary election. But in a sign of the Trumpian times of denial and dispute in the G.O.P., nearly half of the party’s top officials keep trying to reverse the results and get a primary.

The refusal of these Republicans to admit they have lost, or to agree on a set of nominating rules, has fractured a state party already in upheaval: Republicans haven’t won a statewide election since 2009, and they now find themselves with legislative minorities for the first time in a generation. Even the broken windows at the state party’s Richmond headquarters haven’t been fixed for months.

Just a month after former President Donald J. Trump left office, Virginia’s drama is the first state-level boomerang of his legacy. Some state Republicans have internalized the lesson that there is no benefit to accepting results they don’t like, and the result is a paralyzed party unable to set the date, location and rules for how and when it will pick its 2021 nominees for statewide office, including the race for governor.


https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/19/us/politics/virginia-republicans-governor.html

 

[vicarfrog]

The Virginia G.O.P. Voted on Its Future. The Losers Reject the Results.
In a sign of the Trump era’s lingering alternate realities, Republicans in the struggling state party are refusing to move forward with a new system for choosing nominees.



ARLINGTON, Va. — The Republican Party of Virginia has voted four times since December to nominate its candidates for this year’s statewide races at a convention instead of in a primary election. But in a sign of the Trumpian times of denial and dispute in the G.O.P., nearly half of the party’s top officials keep trying to reverse the results and get a primary.

The refusal of these Republicans to admit they have lost, or to agree on a set of nominating rules, has fractured a state party already in upheaval: Republicans haven’t won a statewide election since 2009, and they now find themselves with legislative minorities for the first time in a generation. Even the broken windows at the state party’s Richmond headquarters haven’t been fixed for months.

Just a month after former President Donald J. Trump left office, Virginia’s drama is the first state-level boomerang of his legacy. Some state Republicans have internalized the lesson that there is no benefit to accepting results they don’t like, and the result is a paralyzed party unable to set the date, location and rules for how and when it will pick its 2021 nominees for statewide office, including the race for governor.


https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/19/us/politics/virginia-republicans-governor.html

Meh...the duopoly of Ds and Rs can eat themselves alive for all I care. Snake Plissken for 2024!

 

[vicarfrog]

Expulsion is the only remedy: Insurrectionists in Congress must be rooted out
Republicans in Congress have doubled down on Trump's attempted coup. If we tolerate that, it will happen again





We fight like hell and if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore."

These were the words of then-President Donald Trump as he addressed a large, hostile crowd in front of the White House on Jan. 6, 2021.

It has now been more than a month since Trump and his congressional allies incited and supported the insurrection against our country's democracy. It was an attempt by a mob of violent seditionists to attack the Capitol and stop Congress from affirming the Electoral College victory of Joe Biden. This was planned and orchestrated by the sitting president with the hope that he could remain in power against the will of the people. Five people died. Dozens of police officers were injured. Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi were in grave danger of being seized and murdered. It was an unimaginable and indescribable scene of terror. Many of the insurrectionists had tactical gear and communications equipment. They roamed the halls with zip ties hunting for Pence and Pelosi. They built gallows and chanted death threats. They beat a police officer with a pole bearing the U.S. flag. And let us not forget that President Trump chose not to intervene when the violence began. With the resources at his disposal, he easily and rapidly could have.

Never in our 245-year history has our democracy been actively sabotaged by a sitting president and his congressional sycophants. The events of Jan. 6, 2021 will be highlighted in all history books going forward. The insurrection of our election will never be forgotten. Its significance is on par with Sept. 11, 2001, and Dec. 7, 1941 (Pearl Harbor Day).



https://www.salon.com/2021/02/09/ex...urrectionists-in-congress-must-be-rooted-out/

This pretty much sums up what I do with left/right outrage porn.

 

[hiphopfroggy]

Republicans eye federal funds to help pay Texans’ exorbitant energy bills

The Texas governor, Greg Abbott, called an emergency meeting of state lawmakers to discuss the problem, saying in a statement they had a responsibility to ensure Texans “do not get stuck with skyrocketing energy bills”. On Sunday he announced measures to protect energy consumers.

The disaster declaration issued by the Federal Emergency Management Agency applied to 77 of 254 Texas counties, leading Abbott to say it should cover the whole state.


https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/21/texas-republicans-federal-funds-energy-bills

 

[hiphopfroggy]

Texas freeze shows a chilling truth – how the rich use climate change to divide us
Robert Reich

The Lone Star State is aptly named. If you’re not part of the Republican oil elite with Cruz and Abbott, you’re on your own





Climate change, Covid-19 and jobs are together splitting Americans by class more profoundly than Americans are split by politics. The white working class is taking as much of a beating as most Black and Latino people.

Yet the white working class has been seduced by conservative Republicansand Trump cultists, of which Texas has an abundance, into believing that what’s good for Black and Latino people is bad for them, and that whites are, or should be, on the winning side of the social Darwinian contest.

White grievance helps keep Republicans in power, protecting their rich patrons from a majority that might otherwise join to demand what they need – such as heat, electricity, water and reliable sources of power.

Lower-income Texans, white as well as Black and Latino, are taking it on the chin in many other ways. Texas is one of the few states that hasn’t expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, leaving the share of Texans without health insurance twice the national average, the largest uninsured population of any state. Texas has double the national average of children in poverty and a higher rate of unemployment than the nation’s average.

And although Texans have suffered multiple natural disasters stemming from climate change, Texas Republicans are dead set against a Green New Deal that would help reduce the horrific impacts.

Last Wednesday, Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, went on Fox News to proclaim, absurdly, that what happened to his state “shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States”. Abbott blamed the power failure on the fact that “wind and solar got shut down”.

Rubbish. The loss of power from frozen coal-fired and natural gas plants was six times larger than the dent caused by frozen wind turbines. Texans froze because deregulation and a profit-driven free market created an electric grid utterly unprepared for climate change.

In Texas, oil tycoons are the only winners from climate change. Everyone else is losing badly. Adapting to extreme weather is necessary but it’s no substitute for cutting emissions, which Texas is loath to do. Not even the Lone Star state should protect the freedom to freeze.

https://www.theguardian.com/comment...e-greg-abbott-ted-cruz-oil-gas-green-new-deal

 

[hiphopfroggy]

The Republican solution to losing an election is to make it harder to vote
In the months since the presidential election, Republican state legislatures have leaned into Trump’s baseless election fraud rhetoric and moved quickly to impose new voting restriction.

Specifically, according to a February report from the Brennan Center for Justice, “Thirty-three states have introduced, prefiled, or carried over 165 restrictive bills this year (as compared to 35 such bills in fifteen states on February 3, 2020).”

Some of those bills, such as a measure in Georgia that would end early voting on Sundays, unabashedly target Black voters, who played a major role in Democrats claiming control of the Senate. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution explained Friday, the change “would be a blow to Black churches that host ‘Souls to the Polls’ get-out-the-vote events” on Sundays, in which parishioners are transported by church leaders to polling places after services.

Others, such as a Republican-backed bill in Arizona that would require all vote-by-mail ballots to be notarized, would make it harder for anyone to cast an absentee ballot.

Many of the states where Republicans are pushing new voter restrictions, including Arizona and Georgia, will be sites of competitive Senate races in 2022.

Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly will be seeking a full six-year term in 2022 after winning a special election in 2020, as will Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock, who won his seat in a special election runoff in January this year.

And Republicans will be defending seats in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Iowa — all three states where Republicans have moved to implement new voter restrictions — as well as Florida, where Sen. Marco Rubio will be up for reelection.

Despite the flurry of new bills, however, it’s not a sure thing that Republicans will succeed in passing new voter restrictions into law. In some states, such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Democratic governors could veto any such changes.

And even in Georgia, where Republicans control the governor’s mansion as well as the legislature, one anonymous Republican strategist told the Washington Post that such measures could backfire. “There’s still an appetite from a lot of Republicans to do stuff like this, but it’s not bright,” he said. “It just gives Democrats a baseball bat with which to beat us.”


https://www.vox.com/2021/2/21/22293...-new-voting-restrictions-arizona-iowa-georgia

 

[Eight]

​

 

[gohornedfrogs]

​

It's like playing chess with a pigeon...no matter how good you are, he's going to crap all over the board and strut around like he won anyway.

 

[Wexahu]

The Republican solution to losing an election is to make it harder to vote
In the months since the presidential election, Republican state legislatures have leaned into Trump’s baseless election fraud rhetoric and moved quickly to impose new voting restriction.

Specifically, according to a February report from the Brennan Center for Justice, “Thirty-three states have introduced, prefiled, or carried over 165 restrictive bills this year (as compared to 35 such bills in fifteen states on February 3, 2020).”

Some of those bills, such as a measure in Georgia that would end early voting on Sundays, unabashedly target Black voters, who played a major role in Democrats claiming control of the Senate. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution explained Friday, the change “would be a blow to Black churches that host ‘Souls to the Polls’ get-out-the-vote events” on Sundays, in which parishioners are transported by church leaders to polling places after services.

Others, such as a Republican-backed bill in Arizona that would require all vote-by-mail ballots to be notarized, would make it harder for anyone to cast an absentee ballot.

Many of the states where Republicans are pushing new voter restrictions, including Arizona and Georgia, will be sites of competitive Senate races in 2022.

Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly will be seeking a full six-year term in 2022 after winning a special election in 2020, as will Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock, who won his seat in a special election runoff in January this year.

And Republicans will be defending seats in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Iowa — all three states where Republicans have moved to implement new voter restrictions — as well as Florida, where Sen. Marco Rubio will be up for reelection.

Despite the flurry of new bills, however, it’s not a sure thing that Republicans will succeed in passing new voter restrictions into law. In some states, such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Democratic governors could veto any such changes.

And even in Georgia, where Republicans control the governor’s mansion as well as the legislature, one anonymous Republican strategist told the Washington Post that such measures could backfire. “There’s still an appetite from a lot of Republicans to do stuff like this, but it’s not bright,” he said. “It just gives Democrats a baseball bat with which to beat us.”


https://www.vox.com/2021/2/21/22293...-new-voting-restrictions-arizona-iowa-georgia

Vox, The Guardian, Salon, Politico and the New York Times? You're well on your way to having the gamut covered.

 

[Eight]

It's like playing chess with a pigeon...no matter how good you are, he's going to crap all over the board and strut around like he won anyway.

very true, will leave with one of my favorites. good lord did dolores have a voice

​

 

[vicarfrog]

​

Man, that's deep! Never saw the music video before.