Rudy Giuliani Has Been Served

 

I've been meaning to get to writing something on Giuliani this week, about how he's lost money, his radio show, his mind over Trump...but damn it, the story of an 80 year old man taunting the law whilst service-dodging and getting served at his birthday party is really just on a different level. I could add more about how he isn't helping himself by continuing to spread 2020 election lies and continuing to defame Ms. Moss and Ms. Freeman,

But that image above--it's perfect. Why do more?

Kari Lake, the Armor of God, and the Filter of Vaseline

 

Kari Lake called on her supporters in Arizona to arm themselves ahead of an “intense” period leading up to the election. “We are going to put on the armor of God, and maybe strap on a Glock on the side of us just in case.” The crowd roared its approval.https://t.co/otBB7H2mkK

— Chris Cameron (@ChrisCameronNYT) April 17, 2024

Having spent something like a year and 3/4ths insisting she actually won the contest for AZ governor and only appeared to have lost due to voter fraud rather than conspicuous own goals like eschewing the support of "John McCain Republicans", has now decided to show a more moderate side by (checks notes) suggesting holy war and armed conflict: 

It is not the first time Ms. Lake has alluded to armed conflict with her and her supporters. Last year, she said: “If you want to get to President Trump, you are going to have go through me, and you are going to have to go through 75 million Americans just like me. And I’m going to tell you, most of us are card-carrying members of the N.R.A.,” referring to the National Rifle Association. She added, “That’s not a threat — that’s a public service announcement.”

Her voice is just one in a rising chorus of violent, authoritarian or otherwise aggressive political rhetoric from Mr. Trump and his allies. The former president shared a video late last month featuring an image of President Biden, his Democratic rival, hogtied. He has also said that migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and described his political opponents last year as “vermin” who needed to be “rooted out.”

I don't know about the John McCain Republicans, but this is a very familiar and tragic theme to Gabrielle Giffords Democrats. It is also a grave concern for AZ elections officials. And I think it is doubtful she will back off based on her previous history with such language and associations. Lake's true flaws are too big to airbrush away. She is a reckless demagogue. 

 

Senator Sinema Speaks Her Piece

 

A message for Arizonans from Senator Kyrsten Sinema pic.twitter.com/1XWFSWgGdh

— Kyrsten Sinema (@SenatorSinema) March 5, 2024

Having watched this a number of times, my brain has settled on translating the change of tenses as: "I was trying to solve problems by embracing working across the aisle, but we weren't having that, were we? So you lost out. Audi 5000, you guys." 

I've tried to grasp what makes an intelligent person who presented as a left-leaning politician decide to explore the middle and it always came up as a fashion statement--which isn't to minimize what she tried to do, it's just to say that when McCain did it, it was because he "remembered when". Now, I just got done posting that we could use folks willing to be bipartisan and bemoaned that guys like Jim Lankford weren't getting credit--from Republicans for doing just that. And I'm not saying bipartisanship is wrong--it's just that it can't exist for its own sake. Shafting voting bills or minimum wage raises--things dear to the Democratic base, is just masochism. 

What darlings would the GOP get asked to surrender? (Not the carried interest deduction. But what?) 

The valley that exists--the great disruption in our bipartisanship, has to do to a large extent with distrust. I think it was Grover Norquist who defined bipartisanship as "date rape"--meaning one side had the upper hand and the other had to comply by force. Graceful acquiescence to the needs of the present moment just isn't the current ethos. It's sad. It's true though. We just don't think doing business with the other side doesn't involve, to be extremely blunt--getting fucked. 

Trying to explore that middle ground cost Sinema a lot. I think a lot of us cynics could have told her what would have happened for free. And I wish her well in her future endeavors. And I wish Ruben Gallego VERY WELL in his. Please start contributing to this good man's campaign. 

TWGB: F'ing Around During Finding Out Season

 

So, it looks like the brilliant press conference displaying the report that was supposed to present "irrefutable proof" of his Georgia win and all-around innocence has been cancelled because his lawyers told him it was a very, very bad idea. This disappoints me so much because I was hoping to bend the report over and give it a right Bishop Berkely refutation (by means of employing one's foot to the meat of the argument). It is apparently not to be. Who knew that reiterating one's fraudulent claims could pose such a hassle?

It is possible something has changed in the atmosphere of TrumpWorld. Even Trump's Truth Social posts are creating a problem for him: is he witness-tampering? Is he giving the message to others to do witness tampering--or even jury-tampering? Because jury-tampering appears to be part of what is going down. Threats against jurors and court officials are now being investigated in the wake of the most-recent indictment. 

And these sad, violent souls think they are "helping".  They also like to apply Trump's new term "rigger" in the way he meant it--a word with two hard "r's". What he always meant by the vote-rigging in 2020  2016 and since isn't lost on me, or anyone with a good sense of who he is. And his race-based theories as well as his voter-fraud theories were and are...baseless. 

Flailing in the Scandal Mines

 

I just wanted to highlight this slightly missed major story from the halls of Congress that commenter Dan Kleiner pointed out--Jamie Raskin entered into the record a document that everyone should have already known about from the first impeachment with respects to Joe Biden and Burisma, which was: the supposed bribery is very heavily denied. The response of Jim Comer about this is "yeah, but our very respected tipster Rudy Giuliani never mentioned anything about that." That doesn't feel really probative to me, you guys. I mean, I might be tempted to do foolish things but having my whole investigation rest on the word of Four Seasons Total landscaping guy is a stretch. 

For what it's worth, Rudy Giuliani is about as fallen a human as humans ever get. He defamed election workers, He's liable to get disbarred in DC. He's under a civil lawsuit for some eye-wateringly disgusting sexist shit. I would not, myself, trust the word of perpetually drunken and disheveled former America's Mayor Rudy Giuliani if it came to the goddamn rain without checking out a window. He's a joke, but here's the kind of joke he is:

This man wants to tell everyone they are dumb as hell if they don't think the little baggie of cocaine is Hunter's. Again, like no one else in the world uses cocaine, when My God! They sure do. And also so what if it was his? An addict relapses, news at eleven. It's just a story about a tragedy of how using has a grip on a human's life, it isn't a failure of the Biden Administration. 

TWGB: The Truth Has a Way

 

A funny old thing just happened--Mike Lindell lost in arbitration a stupid claim that he would pay $5 million to someone who proved his stolen election data wrong. Of course it was proven to be bullshit. Trump lost. He just did. He didn't win the popular vote the first time around, and in 2020 he massively lost the popular vote and didn't win the electoral either. He lost it by too much to plausibly even steal it. His whole ass got kicked in by Joe Biden. 

I get that people like Pete Navarro think that Trump had a path to victory via state legislatures doing the most. This is of course stealing and a fraud. It's funny he cops to that in order to slag "The Kraken"--Sidney Powell. She was operating at the time as a whole soldier though--she was probably instrumental in acquiring the breached data that TrumpWorld was going to use to challenge Georgia's vote--you know, the vote interference that Fani Willis and Special Counsel Jack Smith are both looking into. 

Powell's stupid conspiracy theories were bad and looked bad. The line Navarro wants to use is--why screw about with theories as to why the vote totals don't work out in Trump's favor when state legislatures can just overrule them anyway? 

The theories are dumb--the steal is smart. 

Kari Lake is Somehow Still Not Governor of Arizona

 

I joined @JustTheNews to talk about our incredible victory before the Arizona Supreme Court this week.

It's so nice to be able to talk about good news for once! pic.twitter.com/oXaXVoeRAg

— Kari Lake (@KariLake) March 25, 2023

I can't do another TWGB because two back to back is one thing, but three is a whole emergency situation that the blog has never actually drilled for, and in the meantime, Ms. Vaseline Lens experienced an incredible victory that she is explaining to entire hamfaced John Solomon and I wondered, "What, now?"

She's talking about a review of Maricopa County. Most of what she wanted was rejected, but ok. They are checking one area. She very likely still lost, but I see what she's trying. They are going to pretend that they have no earthly idea where the ballots in Maricopa country came from because they can't account for how each and every one got delivered. Therefore, they must have been sketchy. 

Is the standard of "they must have been sketchy" a standard that should overturn an election, though? You have no proof of sketchiness, after all. Who created the sketchy votes? How was any pattern of vote sketchiness organized? IOW, if you can't describe the method and means of the sketchy votes, you have to admit there were voters and they did vote, and if you can't verify all the votes, neither can you falsify them. If the voters are real, then the votes recorded have a certain validity. 

In other words, what the fuck, Kari, just admit you lost and move the fuck on!

There is a Reason Kari Lake Lost

 

"There's not a darn reason we should've lost" -- Kari Lake comes close to admitting defeat pic.twitter.com/ek12xUjENy

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 24, 2023

But a recent news story tells us exactly what happened: she did it to herself.  

But according to the Republic, Lake’s loss boils down to the fact that she alienated vast swaths of her fellow Republicans, pointing to a recent analysis of the public voting records to identify the “disaffected voters” who support the majority of candidates from one political party but cast a vote for the opposing party in a specific race.

“The numbers show that while Lake claims she lost because of printer problems or other issues in Maricopa County,” wrote the Republic’s Mary Jo Pitzl, “she could have won had she not turned off voters in the state’s most populous county who backed a host of other Republican candidates”:

Or long story short:

Kari Lake Lost Because Nearly 40,000 Maricopa County Voters Cast Ballots for Other GOP Candidates, But Not Her

Because maybe she needed the "John McCain Republicans" she was so hot to deride.  Maybe she made it too easy for Katie Hobbs to turn down a debate by acting exactly like the radical that Hobbs wanted to depict her as. And maybe focusing on the last election--2020--cost her 2022 because she wasn't focused on winning, but what to do if she lost. 

And bizarrely, she's still in denial-land. She's still trying to appeal her loss. Her Twitter feed and that of her "War Room" share random data points that don't prove any coordinated fraud, and she sits and bitches about her loss with people like Bannon who shouldn't be touched with a twenty-foot pole and supports Mike Lindell (!?) for RNC chair. Or Harmeet Dhillon. Depending on the day you ask. Anyone but whoever let her lose. But she ran a campaign that doubled down on stupid and is now setting herself up to look like an election denialist kook if she runs for anything else. 

And I say "Good". Better we all understand who we are dealing with so that Ruben Gallego kicks her narrow ass if she runs for Senate. And maybe she is just taking a very dishonest page from her hero, Donald Trump's, book regarding the profitability of crying "rigged". It's a pretty decent dollar--that fake indignation dollar. 

It would be lovely not to ever hear from this crank again. 

Flies in the Vaseline (UPDATED)

 

It really does look like GOP AZ gubernatorial candidate and election denier Kari Lake is not going to pick up enough votes to win the contest. This shouldn't be an actual surprise since election-denying gubernatorial and secretary of state candidates have gone down this cycle all over. But this was the closest contest, in a state where there were actual Cyber Ninjas looking for bamboo ballots not that long ago, so this is the race where I do believe there will be some fuckery. 

Because I do not think Kari Lake will be ignored. Because even though rumor had it that the Trump election-deniers really wanted to start shit over a "close" PA race that never was close, the best shot they have for keeping the election fraud myth alive lies in AZ's supposed "slow" count. (Even though slow is careful. Dotting i's and crossing t's, as it were.) And because the "agents of intolerance" once decried by John McCain are very active in the election-denial movement. 

Kari Lake quite famously said she didn't want the votes of "John McCain Republicans" in more harsh terms. She might have wished she had been a bit more conciliatory, but hindsight is probably not more the strength of her faction of politics than foresight is. 

The people she does align with are the Jericho marchers. These are the sort of folks who, although white-bread Christians, see fit to blow a shofar horn as if they are genuinely acting out of a sense of having been chosen by God, even if this an appropriation of a tradition that is not their own. Their circumambulation suggests a threat, the reverse of people with faith in elections or democracy--to pull down the institution they surround. 

To get even weirder, Ali Alexander thinks he can "will" the election the way he wants via prayer, which, ok, but, you know. Trump lost. Among tons of others. So. His record is bad. 

For my part, I've tried to not talk about Kari Lake, despite her two-facedness regarding drag shows, and her obvious last-minute bid for sympathy by a "white powder incident" at her campaign headquarters which looks like a stunt--buy hey! not more complicated than Little Marco's!  And I almost felt a pang of sympathy for her eagerness to please when she vacuumed a rug for Donald Trump. It reminded me of Annette Bening's character in American Beauty.  She was going to sell this house today. 

I tried not to dismiss her and her odd robotic weird uncanny-valley nonsense as "Scary Flake"--it felt misogynistic. But if she wants to pretend that the election got stolen from her, if she loses by a margin not too dissimilar from the one Trump lost by two years ago, and in the company of Mark Finchem (a kook) and Blake Masters (who looks like he skins puppies because Yankee Candle doesn't come in that scent), well, it's just possible she's trying to be Trump's little darling today, but that won't do shit for her long-term chances at political relevance.

It would be better to go out with her dignity intact (such as it is) and take a run at the useless and badly implicated in 1/6 GOP AZ chair Kelli Ward, amirite? 

But that just like, my opinion. 

And I think it's pretty amusing the way Meghan McCain and Liz Cheney have already dunked on her via Twitter. For some Republican women, her act has already been a bridge too far. 

 

UPDATE: She's been to Mar-A-Lago, she's vowing to fight, she's got people wildly exaggerating about their "voter suppression" (when they still were able to vote!) and maybe her campaign has indicated that they just can't hold back those hardcore fans of hers to Maricopa Co.--fair warning! 

She is absolutely turning out how I thought she would. 

Protecting their "Source"?

 

After the 2016 presidential election, Gregg Phillips of True the Vote claimed, without evidence, he had “verified” that over 3 million votes had been cast by noncitizens — just enough to wipe out Hillary Clinton’s margin in the popular vote tally. https://t.co/Zz3fflw3fd

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) November 1, 2022

Is it to protect a valuable insider or to protect the grift? Because I don't know... 

But I do know their lies are leading to voter intimidation and vote suppression right now. 

UPDATE: I mean, and always have, stuff like True the Vote is always an op.  Big money is spent telling dumb motherfuckers to go out and do maybe illegal stuff because of vague and manipulated data and it is not some grassroots concern--it's always big wheels turning. The idea that people will be arrested for interfering with actual lawful voting (because voter intimidation is a crime) could become a casus belli  for people who want to fight for the right to deny anyone the vote because of some outward stigmata of brownness, youth, or gender fuckery that makes legal papers bearing one's proper gender an issue (that common sense could easily resolve, but in tetchy ridiculous civil rights tribunal terms, would not be).

I like anything that tells these bigoted fucks "No." Like staying their armed and ready asses from continuing to intimidate voters.

Is this the "Finding Out", Yet? (UPDATED)

 

Breaking: Federal investigators have subpoenaed Georgia GOP chairman for information related to fake elector scheme there, as DOJ has issued fresh round of subpoenas to people from several states who acted as rogue electors after 2020 presidential election https://t.co/2c35eZBXXO

— Jim Sciutto (@jimsciutto) June 23, 2022

Because I was kind of waiting for this part.

UPDATE: Jeffrey Clark's home was searched.  I know, I know. But this is moving in the right direction (concentric circles towards the Trump White House.)

UPDATE: After all Kelli Ward's mean girl stuff over Rusty Bowers. (who still would support Trump as a 2024 GOP nominee for president after all this) I just find her and her husband's grand jury subpoenas funny as hell, because of the fake electors but also how she was behind the Cyber Ninja stupid recount and is now on a whole other grift. And I really feel she is not going to have good answers for herself because this is what you get when political posturing takes over from any sense of reality or accountability.

UPDATE: You know, I would not be surprised in Ronna McDaniel is going to have to go through a few things, because the RNC was on this. Just a feeling. But we're up to fake elector plots in seven states (I think) getting looked at hard, and this is fraud. If they purported to be presenting official documents that were no such thing on the basis of the fraudulent voter fraud claims, then the people who knew very well what they were may have been perpetrating a multistate fraud. Grand theft election?

What I'm saying is--it looks bad. 

UPDATE: Wait what? They got John Eastman's phone and he's so mad he wants it back RIGHT NOW you guys. Based Eastman's two work email accounts and busy behind shopping conspiracy theories and how to overthrow elections advice, i really does feel like shit is getting real. He went on Tucker Carlson tonight so you know what? He has a problem. 

TWGB: "Actual Fraud is Irrelevant"

 

Politico dropped a story about John Eastman's emails that show that he was working with state legislatures regarding strategies to overturn the election, vis getting the alternate elector slates approved in the states where the vote totals demonstrated Trump lost. The plan? Basically, throw out the number of votes you don't like the look of, and just count the ones you actually want. Easy peasy! 

PA State Rep. Russ Diamond understood the assignment pretty well, I think:

(click to embiggen)

He basically said, welp, the Trump attorneys didn't prove their case and at least once totally lied, but why prove actual fraud if you don't agree with the election.  Apparently "there oughta be a law!" against people voting against Trump.  And yes, I hate it, because that's my vote they were talking about throwing out so casually. I didn't even give my ballot to a Soros-funded mule. I mailed the SOB by mailbox. Russ Diamond voted for Act 77  (he was for it before he was against it) that made voting this way possible.

See why I don't trust Republicans? I was born in the election year of the Watergate break in. They have been like this my whole life. 

But anyway, the bigger message is--the Trump side hasn't ever actually proved fraud--they basically have been throwing spaghetti against the wall this whole time. When you list the claims, they get ridiculous:  the Venezuelan software, the Italian satellites, the German servers, the Chinese thermostats, the Chinese ballots (with bamboo in the fibers, even!), and the South Korean jet planes, etc.

The claims never had to make sense. Time was of the essence and all they wanted to do was get everything finagled into place by 1/6th. Here in Pennsylvania, in Georgia, in Arizona, etc. All the "audits" and stuff after the fact are more about 2024. I mean, they worked so hard to find fraud--it would be silly to think states forked over a bunch of money to prove something that never really existed at all right?

HAHAHAHAHA! Yeah. but this is TrumpWorld. It's funny that way.

TWGB: One Insurrection, Many Fronts

 

Forgive me for returning to Senator Cruz, groveller, for a minute, because he revealed a dynamic that is both faintly hilarious and deeply disturbing in that he knows that the FBI didn't fucking instigate the melee on 1/6, and he was one of the fuckfaces who gave a speech to rile up the crowd on 1/6 and also had been spewing nonsense about wanting to argue extremely dodgy Texas AG Ken Paxton's lawsuit against the states who voted the wrong way. One of the reasons he gave credence to the whole Epps thing is because he would love something else to be at fault other than literally everything he aided and abetted. And I had thought at the time that Cruz, like Josh Hawley and others, was simply playing a very cynically game and performing stupid tricks for the camera--but these tricks were at least treason-adjacent. But maybe he was an actual believer,

I mean, the insurrectionists thought he was. "What a tangled web we weave...." as the Bard might have put it. 

But the recent arrest of Oath Keepers' founder Stewart Rhodes and 10 others for seditious conspiracy changes things a bit because it looks there was an organized effort to take the Capitol and hold it and bring in more firepower in order to enact more violence for a specific end. (Getting the election decided for Trump, obvs.)  Now, hacks like Byron York or Brit Hume might be dismissive of the "attempted" insurrection in rather the way they scoffed at Trump's attempted extortion of the president of Ukraine, but facts are stubborn things, and when there is violence attached to them, they become harder to ignore. So obviously, if Rhodes and the Oath Keepers were planning before 1/6, they weren't riled up in the few days before-but were...waiting for this and dead certain Trump called them up for this--so says their lawyer!   And their readiness was exploited by cynical political machinations. 

How cynical?  I noted back in December 2020 that Trump supporters were already fomenting violence in contested states and that false electors were trying to put forward their own pro-Trump slates. I thought that was a kind of weird futile stunt then, but obviously unhealthy. But in the paradigm of the Trump Eastman memo and all that, these alternate slates existed in case Pence went ahead and rejected the confirmed states Trump wanted him to. Seven states put in alternate slates of electoral votes for Trump. The likelihood of them being accepted was remote and the process of submitting them was fraudulent, but it also looks coordinated because it wasn't just all these folks in these states having the same bright idea, right? No! That looks like a group effort. I'd love to know is Meadows has a story about that. 

It Was An Awful Lot of Trouble, Wasn't It?

A draft of a review ordered by Arizona Senate Republicans confirms President Biden defeated Donald Trump in Maricopa County last November https://t.co/nIZmiTFczq

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) September 24, 2021

Has anyone ever gone to as much trouble as Trump and his friends have to determine exactly how much his sorry behind lost by? And so little trouble to find out the actual reason why he lost: focusing on, of all things, how to steal this election if he didn't win instead of actually coping with the trials and tribulations of the actual office? 

We are lucky these folks are incompetent. Just too lucky to count on the luck holding.

A Bit Too Sinematic

 AZ Senator Kyrsten Sinema has offered her thoughts regarding the reason she opposes changing the filibuster rules, and the reason is--"it protects the democracy of our nation", and I don't know about that. Passing an act to ensure the voting rights of all the people eligible would protect our democracy. Relying on members of a party who have explicitly given up on the idea that that's a good thing seems badly mistaken. 

It's too easy to focus on Sinema because of her earlier, progressive-alienating antics regarding the minimum wage. She isn't alone in being a Democratic Senator who is leery of abandoning the filibuster rule, she's just very visible (and she tries to be, and I guess that's part of the pile-on, too). But there's this dodgy history. So I don't want to pile on, but I do want to make a little suggestion:

Sometimes you have to understand what your voters put you were you are for. I think we've got a cycle where people are pretty pissed off that something isn't working in our politics, and you don't want to be the person who looks like they aren't working. So not showing up to vote for the January 6 investigation was pretty bad, because Arizona is one of the states that was and is very much challenged by GOP electoral fuckery, and it would be very meaningful to Arizona Democrats to know they had someone who would fight for them, instead of pussyfooting about. This state is changing and Republicans there are not happy--but it's still happening.

Here's where I'm cutting slack, though--I don't know, besides Sinema and Manchin, who else might be on the fence about breaking the filibuster, I have worries about Feinstein, because I don't know where her head is. Angus King has been reluctant. There could be others--so just putting the whole weight on Sinema and Manchin doesn't feel right, and there is the blowback--if something gets f'd up enough, and somehow GOP gains seats, a Republican-lead Senate in a filibusterless world is gonna ssuuuuuuuuccccckkkkk. 

So, while Sinema seems kind of capricious, and yeah, I think I'm puzzled by her particular stance, Manchin's reasons are also kind of self-serving (but what if it were possible to try to generate more WV Democratic/progressive interest by bucking moderation for a bit--I did see Sanders signs down in WV during the 2016 primary and I think younger voters might be up for that), yet I don't know what other, deeper opposition exists, or what other political heads are trying to game out. 

It would be great if we could just run down a wishlist of liberal policies at the moment and get'em done, but it's always going to be a fight. This is why every election counts. But damn it--the voting rights one just feels crucial for the elections to come! And I still don't get why Sinema voted against the minimum wage thing and her absence from the vote on the insurrection investigation still sort of feels off. AZ GOP is ridiculous, but that's actually all the more reason to go about the job of US Senator for AZ very seriously. 

Uncool

Did Sinema really have vote against a $15 minimum wage for 24 million people like this? pic.twitter.com/Jv0UXLKLHI

— Sawyer Hackett (@SawyerHackett) March 5, 2021

This woman is out of her damn mind if she thinks this is how you bring your unserious ass to the US Senate and pretend you scored points making not one thing better for anyone. I guessed that she was disingenuous in her response regarding the filibuster, but now I flat-out think she's a fake. It wouldn't cost her damn thing politically to do what's right. She isn't keeping her liberal support stunting like this for what? Five confused McCain Republicans? And even if this thing was a hard decision, she could have done the world a favor and acted like it instead of coming out like an overgrown high school child. 

She can just decide not to run again and spare someone the expense of primarying her if this is how little she thinks about doing it right, because that was disappointing.

UPDATE:  Criticizing her about this is apparently supposed to be sexist: 

Sinema’s office responded to a question about the gesture by making the absurd claim that the inquiry is sexist. “Commentary about a female senator’s body language, clothing, or physical demeanor does not belong in a serious media outlet,” Hannah Hurley, a spokesperson for Sinema, told HuffPost.

No. It would be sexist to have two different standards, and I honestly think pulling out sexism on this particular gesture is a shame and a distraction from what makes it bad. It's bad because it looked like she was happy to vote against a pay raise that would lift millions of people, many of them women and working families, out of poverty. I support women, but I don't support foolishness from women because I don't support foolishness from anyone, and especially not regarding things that matter. 

Raising the minimum wage--now that would support women, because they would be better able to support themselves with the money they make. That's good old fashioned "feminism goals", not this "breaking the internet" and "yas queen"-ing people for their style over their substance.

UPDATE: Just to add, she's one of eight Democrats who voted against increasing the minimum wage, and of course, it could be part of a separate bill, but like, why? It's overdue to be increased, it would significantly improve the finances of people working right now, it gets money circulating, and it actually cuts government spending in some respects because people need less aid, because they get money from work. Maybe tying it to COVID relief is problematic, but income inequality is responsible for the impact COVID-19 has had and this remediates that.  I don't see why this one has to be hard.

But How?

“What I did not realize was all of the national conversation about states like Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, was seen as casting doubt on the validity of votes coming out of predominantly Black communities like Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Detroit,” https://t.co/QuLQUwlh4s

— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) January 15, 2021

When Ted Cruz and others pulled their dumb "contest the electors" stunt, one of the people I was surprised to see add their voice to the appalling lie was Sen. Lankford, who just never struck me as the type. Maybe 2022 was just creeping up on him and giving him the willies about possibly being primaried if he wasn't going to pull his head out. I don't know. What I do know is, it's absurd that he had no idea that contesting the votes in the areas that were contested would be "perceived" as being about the legitimacy of Black voters. It's doubly absurd that he would expect people to believe that.

My perspective might be colored, in part, by being from Philadelphia. The specificity with which Trump and his campaign legal team attacked voter counts in some areas wasn't lost on us here. But it was a national story. Giuliani and friends knew exactly what they were doing.

I note that it seems like Lankford was particularly interested in contesting the Arizona vote count--Biden was put over the top there with the help of the Navajo Nation. COVID-19 has hit native people hard, and they were voting for their lives. That man did a whole lot of "not thinking".

So on one hand, yes, an apology was in line, and kudos for getting right on it, because Hawley*, Cruz, others, probably won't apologize at all. But saying "I didn't know it was racist," just really exceeds my bullshit bandwidth. He needs to be more honest about what his own motives had been, and what his party has been about for literally decades now.

UPDATE: Sen. Hawley explains that he was representing the people of Missouri, who were just deeply concerned with whether the Pennsylvania state constitution was being followed or some such twaddle. To which I obviously and without equivocation state, "Mind your own fucking business."