babylonsister
babylonsister's JournalTom Cotton Yells Random Questions at Garland, Leaves Senate Hearing in a Huff

https://www.thedailybeast.com/unhinged-sen-tom-cotton-lashes-out-at-ag-merrick-garland-before-puffing-out-of-senate-hearing?ref=home
Tom Cotton Yells Random Questions at Garland, Leaves Senate Hearing in a Huff
SENATOR SOAPBOX
Corbin Bolies
Breaking News Intern
Published Oct. 27, 2021 1:40PM ET
Tasos Katopodis/Pool/AFP via Getty
As nothing seemed to stick, Cotton went for his ultimate power move, yelling: This testimony, your directiveyour performance is shameful. Thank God youre not on the Supreme Court. You should resign in disgrace, Judge! Cotton then got up and left the room, though Garland was given a chance to respond. I wasnt sure there was a question there, he said.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1453399055887970318
Who Messed Up Devin Nunes' Campaign Records This Bad? His Mom.
womp womp
https://www.thedailybeast.com/who-messed-up-devin-nunes-campaign-records-this-bad-his-mom?ref=home
Who Messed Up Devin Nunes Campaign Records This Bad? His Mom.
Mangled
It turns out that Rep. Devin Nunes mom has produced errors in his campaign-finance reports going back 17 years.
Roger Sollenberger
Political Reporter
Updated Oct. 27, 2021 5:36AM ET / Published Oct. 27, 2021 4:58AM ET
This spring, after receiving a number of federal warnings about a series of accounting errors, the campaign committee for Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) embarked on a financial reckoning.
As a result of that reckoning, the campaign has now had to correct a slew of reports, and two of Nunes affiliated committees removed his treasurerhis momas their government contact.
But over the last few months, Nunes mother, Toni Nunes, has filed a confounding series of financial disclosures. The reports attempt to correct an array of accounting errors and oversights, some dating back to 2004, and because the errors carry over from one accounting period to the next, all subsequent filings were also incorrectmeaning the California Republicans books have been off for 17 years.
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In 2019, Nunes, a voracious litigant, cited his mom in two lawsuits. One was a $77.5 million civil action filed in an Iowa district court charging Esquire and journalist Ryan Lizza with defamation for a report that suggested the Nunes clan had tried to hide the use of undocumented labor at their Iowa dairy farm. A judge tossed the lawsuit the next year.
A separate $250 million defamation suit filed that same year in Henrico County, VA, targeted an array of defendants, including an anonymous parody Twitter account called @DevinNunesMom, who according to the complaint falsely impersonated Nunes mother, and created and maintained an account on Twitter (@DevinNunesMom) for the sole purpose of attacking, defaming, disparaging and demeaning Nunes.
The complaint cited tweets calling Nunes a Putin shill and a treasonous shitbag, and demanded the court unveil the human entity behind the parody account. A judge tossed the lawsuit this summer.
Sen. Wyden Unveils Plan to Raise Billions by Taxing 700 Most Ridiculously Wealthy Americans
https://www.thedailybeast.com/wyden-unveils-billionaires-income-tax-plan-to-raise-billions-by-taxing-700-most-ridiculously-wealthy-americans?ref=homeSen. Wyden Unveils Plan to Raise Billions by Taxing 700 Most Ridiculously Wealthy Americans
PAYBACK TIME
Jamie Ross
News Correspondent
Published Oct. 27, 2021 6:55AM ET
Reuters/Isaiah J. Downing
Birx: 130,000 Americans Would Be Alive Today If Trump Hadn't Been "Distracted" by the Election
Levin Report
Birx: 130,000 Americans Would Be Alive Today If Trump Hadnt Been Distracted by the Election
That, and if he werent an anti-science megalomaniac who doesnt care about anyone not named Trump.
By Bess Levin
October 26, 2021
As America learned last year, one of the many problems with electing an anti-science megalomanic who doesnt read, wont listen, and thinks windmills cause cancer is that when a highly contagious virus comes around killing people with alarming speed, hes the last person you want in charge. A brief, in no way conclusive list of the ways Donald Trump reportedly made the COVID-19 situation worse in the U.S. includes but is in no way limited to:
Actively lying to the public about how dangerous it was;
Listening to his idiot son-in-law, who decided the whole thing wasnt a health reality;
Refusing to invoke the Defense Production Act because corporate CEOs asked him not to;
Sidelining doctors and and scientists;
Scrapping national testing plan because the virus was mostly hurting blue states at the time;
Touting unproven drugs instead of masking and social distancing;
Nixing a plan to send free masks to every household in the country;
Regularly holding super-spreader events;
Comparing it to the flu;
Claiming it affects virtually nobody under 18, even though he personally contracted it and had to be pumped full of experimental drugs;
Just being himself.
And while no moment in his presidency would have been an ideal time for the pandemic, according to Deborah Birx, M.D., the timing of the COVID crisis was extra unfortunate given that it coincided with the 2020 election, which Team Trump was apparently more focused on than saving peoples lives. How unfortunate? 130,000-people-would-have-been-alive-today unfortunate. Per The Washington Post:
More than 130,000 American lives could have been saved with swifter action and better coordinated public health messages after the viruss first wave, Birx told investigators.
I believe if we had fully implemented the mask mandates, the reduction in indoor dining, the getting friends and family to understand the risk of gathering in private homes, and we had increased testing, that we probably could have decreased fatalities into the 30-percent-less to 40-percent-less range, Birx said. More than 735,000 Americans have died of coronavirus-related complications since the pandemic began, including more than 300,000 since President Joe Biden took office.
more...
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/deborah-birx-donald-trump-covid-election-deaths
Joe Biden Reminds Trump He's a Has-Been Who Lost the Election

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/donald-trump-joe-biden-january-6-executive-privilege
Joe Biden Reminds Trump Hes a Has-Been Who Lost the Election
Cue Trump screaming in a pitch only dogs can hear.
By Bess Levin
October 26, 2021
During the four anni horribiles that Donald Trump was in office, he and his lawyers regularly tried to hide behind the office of the presidency when it came to legal issues. Sued for defamation by a writer whose rape accusations he claimed were a lie while insulting her looks to boot? According to then attorney general William Barr, Trump was acting in his official capacity as POTUS at the time, and therefore should be defended by the Justice Department. Suspected of committing fraud relating to hush-money payments to a porn star and Playboy model? In that case, his personal attorneys made the bold claim that it was unconstitutional for presidents to be investigated for any crimes whatsoever while in office, including shooting a person on Fifth Avenue.
Now, of course, Trump is not president. Yet he still seems to believe the powers and the privileges of being president should apply to him, an assumption that the actual president has now, on two separate occasions, been forced to explain is about as laughable as the idea of Ivanka Trump being qualified to run the World Bank.
Per CNN:
As part of the House select committees sweeping investigation, the panel has sent requests for information to a number of federal agencies. The committee has specifically asked for all documents and communications within the White House on January 6, including call logs, schedules and meetings with top officials and outside advisers, including Rudy Giuliani.
After the White House refused to keep secret the initial batch of documents requested by the House committee, press secretary Jen Psaki explained that Biden had determined that an assertion of executive privilege is not warranted for the first set of documents from the Trump White House that have been provided to us by the National Archives, adding that the West Wing would evaluate questions of privilege on a case-by-case basis, but the president has also been clear that he believes it to be of the utmost importance for both Congress and the American people to have a complete understanding of the events of that day to prevent them from happening again.
For his part, Trump responded to Bidens decision to allow Congress to find out exactly what he was up to on January 6 by suing Congress and the National Archives and claiming, via his lawyer, that Bidens actions were all about accommodat[ing] his partisan allies, as opposed to believing in the importance of thorough investigation into one of the most shameful days in American history.
Dahlia Lithwick: Who Gets to Ask to "Move On" From Jan. 6
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/10/republicans-jan-6-who-asks-move-on.htmlWho Gets to Ask to Move On From Jan. 6
Its a show of untouchable advantage to remain wholly unaffected by what has occurred.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Oct 26, 20215:45 AM
snip//
Looking forward, whether justified by the need to pick your battles, or depoliticize institutions, or prioritize and triage existential crises, or ignore clownish attention seekers, is so alluringly, quintessentially, and optimistically American. That might be why looking forward and moving on is also the MO for the Biden Justice Department, which has largely opted not to hold anyone in the Trump administration accountable for past crimes or alleged crimes. Looking backward is plodding and past-focused and also aging for the skin. So when Condoleezza Rice, former secretary of state, now the director of the Hoover Institution, said on The View that its time to move on in a lot of ways from the events at the Capitol on Jan. 6, it was of a piece with a larger public zeitgeist that holds that, look, man, everything sucks, everyones busy, COVID is awful, and democracy is basically self-reinforcing, so lets think about tomorrow and leave yesterday where it belongs.
You can be impressed with Rices capacity for contortionism. On the one hand, there she was telling the folks at The View that she cried when she witnessed the events of Jan. 6 and reaffirming that I dont know how much more strongly I can say what happened on Jan. 6 was wrong. But on the other hand, even as she insisted that institutions need to be protected, she also urged that now is the time for lawmakers to move ahead and deal with the American peoples issues. The institutionsand all the assorted vulnerable people who rely on themwill apparently have to fend for themselves. The rank hypocrisy of the move forward dammit contingent of the GOP is hardly limited to Trumpismthe writer Gore Vidal famously wrote in 2004 that happily for the busy lunatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing.
What Ted Cruz and Condoleezza Rice and all the generals of the move on army thus perform here isnt just a cynical manipulation of tempting, forward-looking ideas about unity and priorities and real-world problem-solving. This is, after all, the party of Benghazi and But Her Emails. Its also a show of the kind of untouchable advantage they hold because they always remain wholly unaffected by what has occurred. To be able to ignore the Iraq war, to be free to ignore Trumps pitiless immigration policies, to have the luxury of closing the door on Jan. 6, is not so much a marker of an open mind, an objective and temperate worldview, or a more capacious perspective on what the country needs to see happen next. It is also a mirror of which classes of people were harmed by those events and who remained untouched by them. If you are unable to just get over the Trump teams assaults on the levers of democracy themselves, its not necessarily because you are vengeful and bloodthirsty or transactional. It may simply be, as Chauncey DeVega wrote last winter in Salon, that to put oneself outside or above this present moment is to exercise the privilege of being separate and apart from history and its pushes and its pulls, successes and failures, joy and pain, lived consequences and experiences.
In a perfect Ted Lasso world, we could all be the goldfish: blessed with a 10-second memory and the soothing capacity to sail past errors and regrets into a sunlit world of possibility and new beginnings. But there is a difference between processing, addressing, and remediating past wrongs and being directed by those in power to forget them. The former is the work of justice; the latter is the province of bullies. And as we enter another week in which the actions of Jan. 6 are being probed and evaluated by a select committee that has been stymied by those who insist that its time we all move forwardor elseits worth saying out loud that this isnt about one-half of the country that seeks to look forward as another doggedly remains stuck in the past. This is, instead, about picking between two alternate stories we tell about the same past. One such story might at least pave a path forward to healthier democratic institutions. The other seems ever more destined to drag us into a future in which we are seemingly doomed to keep repeating the very horrors we are being told to forget.
Donald Trump Jr.'s 'Sick' Stunt Earns Him Scathing New Nickname From New York Daily News
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-jr-new-york-daily-news-front-page_n_61779f30e4b09314320f49e8Donald Trump Jr.s Sick Stunt Earns Him Scathing New Nickname From New York Daily News
The tabloid slammed Donald Trumps eldest son for topping sick GOP taunts of Alec Baldwin following the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.
Lee Moran
By
Lee Moran
10/26/2021 03:00am EDT | Updated 6 minutes ago
The New York Daily News slammed Donald Trump Jr. as the SPAWN OF HATIN on its front page Tuesday.
The tabloid ripped ex-President Donald Trumps eldest son for hawking shirts mocking actor Alec Baldwin over the shooting death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, who was shot with what Baldwin was told was an unloaded prop gun on the set of his new movie Rust last week.
https://twitter.com/NYDailyNews/status/1452827745549967362?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1452827745549967362%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.huffpost.com%2Fentry%2Fdonald-trump-jr-new-york-daily-news-front-page_n_61779f30e4b09314320f49e8
Don Jr. tops sick GOP Alec taunts with slimy T-shirt, the newspapers subheadline said of the garments emblazoned with the phrase, Guns Dont Kill People, Alec Baldwin Kills People.
Other Trump-adoring Republicans, including Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and Ohio Senate hopeful J.D. Vance, have also used the tragedy to taunt Baldwin, who impersonated the former president on Saturday Night Live.
Eric Boehlert: Who cares if anti-vaxxers quit their jobs?
https://pressrun.media/p/who-cares-if-anti-vaxxers-quit-theirWho cares if anti-vaxxers quit their jobs?
It's not news
Eric Boehlert
1 hr ago
Wringing its hands at the sight of workers walking away from jobs when faced with simple vaccine mandates, the Wall Street Journal over the weekend became the latest national news outlet to shower attention on the topic.
The sympathetic, 2,000-word Journal piece focused on a minuscule portion of the workforce that has irrationally decided not to take a free, safe, and effective vaccine. Instead of presenting these actions as delusional, the press often frames the quitting as being principled or even heroic. (The resistance is unwavering, the New York Times announced.)
The continued, hand-holding coverage brainwashing is virtually never used represents the latest example of the press helping to normalize irrational, nihilistic behavior by Trump followers.
As we watch a parade of unreasonable people needlessly blow up their careers and walk away from good paying jobs with excellent benefits, the questions that linger are, should we care, and should this trend be breathlessly treated as Big News by the media? Should we care that a tiny percentage is embracing rabbit-hole conspiracies about a vaccine that nearly 200 million Americans have safely taken? Should we care that theyve decided to believe non-stop lies to the point where theyll likely be unemployable for months, and maybe years to come?
snip//
Brainwashed Covid zombies will continue to walk away from good paying jobs and put their families at risk, economically. But that doesnt mean we have to care. And that doesnt mean its news.
Jake Tapper Destroys GOP's 'Cruel' Response to Alec Baldwin Tragedy
https://www.thedailybeast.com/cnn-host-jake-tapper-destroys-gops-cruel-alec-baldwin-tragedy-response?ref=homeJake Tapper Destroys GOPs Cruel Response to Alec Baldwin Tragedy
HEARTBREAKING, FOR NORMAL PEOPLE
The CNN host went after Republicans Lauren Boebert, J.D. Vance and others for making being a horrible person part of the GOP job description.
Matt Wilstein
Senior Writer
Updated Oct. 24, 2021 11:49AM ET / Published Oct. 24, 2021 11:26AM ET
CNN
CNN host Jake Tapper used the last few minutes of his State of the Union broadcast on Sunday to unload on the conversative politicians who saw opportunity in the tragic death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of Alec Baldwins movie Rust last week.
Noting that Hutchins was a rising star in her field who left behind a husband and young son, Tapper said, Heartbreaking, for normal people. But theres something about our politics right now that is driving people away from our shared humanity.
He pointed to Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) who apparently did some digging and found a 2014 tweet from Baldwin about guns that she turned into a joke at his expense. The Colorado congresswoman thought it was funny to exploit hands up, dont shoot, to make a joke at the expense of Baldwin, Tapper said. But more importantly, really to make a joke at the expense of Halyna Hutchins and her husband Matthew and their son Andres.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1452278005666025482
snip//
snip//
He ended the show by recounting a text he received this week from an unnamed Republican official. After J.D. Vances tweet, it read, being a horrible person is now actually a job requirement in this party.
I hope to God that that Republican official is wrong, Tapper concluded.
Trump Advisers Enlisted Ex-Army Psy-Ops Specialist in Bid to Overturn Election
Goes to a lot of premeditation.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trumps-advisors-enlisted-ex-army-psy-ops-colonel-phil-waldron-to-make-case-for-overturning-election
Trump Advisers Enlisted Ex-Army Psy-Ops Specialist in Bid to Overturn Election
LEGAL EAGLE?
Blake Montgomery
Reporter/Editor
Updated Oct. 23, 2021 8:40PM ET /
Published Oct. 23, 2021 8:38PM ET
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