The Messing Link

What is it with Repubilcans and child endangerment and sexual molestation? Republicans used to claim to be the party of family values.  Well, maybe they could claim that label today if they want to say they are the party of Manson Family values. To be fair, the Republicans haven't gone on a murder spree, though their leader, Donald Trump, has declared Vladimir Putin to be a "fine" person and Vladimir Putin's critics have a nasty habit of turning up dead. But only a family that was nearly as depraved as the Manson Family could delight in some of the people the Republicans have been supporting and some of the actions they have been taking lately.

New Jersey Senator Cory Booker wants the Senate to delay approval of President Trump's Supreme Court pick so long as Trump is (allegedly) under investigation by Robert Mueller for criminal activity.

Senator Cory Booker: "The president of the United States is a subject of an ongoing criminal investigation...that could end up before the Supreme Court," so any Trump SCOTUS nomination should be "delayed until the Mueller investigation is concluded." pic.twitter.com/0WwvwNJMYz

— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) June 28, 2018

It appears that Max Della Pia--or his intern--plagiarized sizeable sections of John Ossoff's website when writing his own website. For those outside the NY-23rd Congressional District--Max barely eked out a victory among five competitors in the Democratic primary vying for a chance to send our Congressman, Tom Reed, to the unemployment line.

Congressman Tom Reed posted his thoughts on the North Korea Summit recently on Facebook. The last line of his post justifiably raised some eyebrows.

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Read this article about Cattaraugus County Democratic Committee Chairman Frank Puglisi and his attack on Tracy Mitrano, one of five candidates running in the Democratic primary for a chance to replace Tom Reed in the NY 23rd district.

Roseanne Barr is a despicable human being. She is an unapologetic Trumpanzee who seems to believe that Israel can do no wrong, no matter how brutally it treats Palestinians. She has posted virulently Islamphobic and anti-Palestinian tweets in the past, though one of her recent television shows hinted that that she may have somewhat modified her extremist views. However, those expecting Barr to be a decent human being based on that show were shocked when she showed her true racism by tweeting that Valerie Jarrett, a senior advisor to President Obama who is Black, was the love child between the Muslim Brotherhood and an ape from the Planet of the Apes. 

One despicable smear in one day was not enough for Roseanne. She then libeled George Soros by tweeting that he was a Nazi who helped murder Jews during World War II.  This heinous lie would cause revulsion in any decent person, so naturally Donald Trump Jr. retweeted it.

Israel's Prime Minister put on quite a show on Monday to prove that Iran lied about its nuclear weapons program and that the entire Iranian Nuclear Deal was built on a pack of lies. His speech focused on half a ton of secret Iranian nuclear archives that Israel had obtained.  There can be no question that the purpose of Netanyahu's speech was to persuade Donald Trump to kill the Iranian nuclear weapons deal.  Rather than describe the speech in detail, I'll let you watch it for yourself.

John Bolton, President Trump's National Security Advisor, is a threat to our national security. Those aren't just my words.  Those words, only slightly edited, are the title of the  best article you can read about the threat Bolton poses to the world.  Colin Kahl and Jon Wolfsthal write:

After reading this article about what Iranian hardliners are saying on social media, I was struck by how much the hardliners in Iran and the hardliners in the U.S. mirror each other and feed off each other. The hardliners in Iran (inadvertently) strengthen the hardliners in the U.S. by giving them something to point to and say, "See, we can't trust the Iranians--they are going to violate the JCPOA and build missiles that threaten us." Meanwhile, hardliners like John Bolton (inadvertently) give the Iranian hardliners something to point to and say, "See, we can't trust the Americans". The similarity between American and Iranian hardliners even extends to their alarm at our trade imbalances with China. Our hardliners and Iranian hardliners might actually get along if they took their collective heads out of their asses and tried--really tried-- to see things from each others' point of view. But if they were accustomed to trying to view the world from other countries' points of view they would probably not be hardliners in the first place. Here are some excerpts from the article, but I recommend reading the whole thing.

The Republican party has become thoroughly corrupt, possibly treasonous, and dangerous to our democracy and to the world. By this, I do not mean every Republican is corrupt. I do not mean that every Republican is treasonous or turns a blind eye towards treason. And I do not mean every Republican is a danger to democracy. There are some Republicans like Jeff Flake, Mitt Romney, and John McCain who have acted honorably. But the party as a whole has done little if anything to stop the corruption or to protect our democratic institutions. The Republicans must be crushed in the next few elections for our national security and for the continued existence of our democracy. I don't expect a single Republican to pay attention to me. After all, I am what many of them would call a "libtard". I have opposed Trump since May 2016, and in October 2016 I wrote a blog post predicting that Donald Trump would be an existential threat to our democracy. So I expect Republicans to react to this by holding their hands over their ears and saying, "LA LA LA  I CAN'T HEAR YOU!"  So if you are a Republican, I don't expect you to listen to me. But I do want you to consider two articles by your fellow Republicans and one article by two strictly nonparitsan authors. I will post excerpts from each of these articles, but reading these highlights is no substitute for reading these articles in their entirety.