US Politics: #Musky DeSaster

[Kalnak the Magnificent]

39 minutes ago, maarsen said:

Paying  $130,000 for a quick dipping of the wick is not something one brags about. That is the point to make.  

It kind of is. Fucking porn stars and being rich enough to not care about it is kind of the American dream. It is not particularly emasculating, and certainly won't be to his audience. 

If you want to emasculate him you'd need to say something about his kid's parentage or those rumors of his wife hooking up with the secret service.

[Martell Spy]

Yep, lock the terrorist up.

Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes sentenced to 18 years in prison for plot to keep Trump in power

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/25/politics/oath-keepers-sentencing-stewart-rhodes-kelly-meggs/index.html

Quote

 

Stewart Rhodes, the founder and leader of the Oath Keepers, was sentenced to 18 years in prison on Thursday for leading a far-reaching plot to keep then-President Donald Trump in power after he lost the 2020 election.

The sentence is the first handed down in over a decade for seditious conspiracy.

“What we absolutely cannot have is a group of citizens who – because they did not like the outcome of an election, who did not believe the law was followed as it should be – forment revolution,” District Judge Amit Mehta said before handing down the sentence. “That is what you did.”

“I dare say, Mr. Rhodes – and I never have said this to anyone I have sentenced – you pose an ongoing threat and peril to our democracy and the fabric of this country,” Mehta said.

The judge added: “I dare say we all now hold our collective breaths when an election is approaching. Will we have another January 6 again? That remains to be seen.”

Mehta said Rhodes, 58, has expressed no remorse and continues to be a threat.

“A seditious conspiracy, when you take those two concepts and put it together, is among the most serious crimes an American can commit,” the judge said. “It is an offense against the government to use force. It is an offense against the people of our country.”

Earlier on Thursday, Mehta ruled that Rhodes’ actions amounted to domestic terrorism.

 

 

[Mindwalker]

In case someone still cares, there are some mildly interesting new insights into the documents case:

- Two of Donald Trump’s employees moved boxes of papers the day before FBI agents and a prosecutor visited the former president’s Florida home to retrieve classified documents in response to a subpoena — timing that investigators have come to view as suspicious ... (no kidding, Sherlock!)

- Trump and his aides also allegedly carried out a “dress rehearsal” for moving sensitive papers even before his office received the May 2022 subpoena, ...

- Prosecutors in addition have gathered evidence indicating that Trump at times kept classified documents in his office in a place where they were visible and sometimes showed them to others...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/05/25/trump-classified-documents-mar-a-lago/

I'm sure someone is very close to moving towards inching closer to ponder an indictment, for something or other, any month or year now.

Edited May 25 by Mindwalker

[mormont]

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

And that on top of it he's a pathetic lay. Kind of kills the strongman vibes. 

The sort of person who would be impressed by Trump fucking a porn star would not be the sort of person who cares if she had a good time.

[Tywin et al.]

31 minutes ago, mormont said:

The sort of person who would be impressed by Trump fucking a porn star would not be the sort of person who cares if she had a good time.

The MAGA dude-bros won't, but for some it breaks the illusion. Again I don't think you need to peel that many people from him to beat him. At least in the general. 

[Jace, Extat]

4 hours ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

DeSantis' rollout is not great, but it probably is meaningless for his success. It is, however, a pretty damning indictment of using Twitter as that kind of platform and looks pretty shitty for Musk. 

What did Elon do? That's two tethers you've made between the men in as many threads. 

I've said mean things about E-dizzle but what's up? That's some hateful comparison there. 

[DMC]

19 minutes ago, Secretary of Eumenes said:

What did Elon do? That's two tethers you've made between the men in as many threads. 

I've said mean things about E-dizzle but what's up? That's some hateful comparison there. 

....Huh?  The announcement was hosted via Musk's account.  Well, that is it was supposed to be but it kept on crashing so Musk transferred it to David Sacks' account.  Kal isn't making any "tethers" up here, Musk was directly involved in the announcement and its failure.

[Jace, Extat]

12 minutes ago, DMC said:

....Huh?  The announcement was hosted via Musk's account.  Well, that is it was supposed to be but it kept on crashing so Musk transferred it to David Sacks' account.  Kal isn't making any "tethers" up here, Musk was directly involved in the announcement and its failure.

What announcement? I think I missed something

[DMC]

Just now, Secretary of Eumenes said:

What announcement? I think I missed something

DeSantis' announcement that was launched (or rather failed to launch for a half hour) on Twitter yesterday.  That's exactly what Kal and others are referring to.

[Jace, Extat]

7 minutes ago, DMC said:

DeSantis' announcement that was launched (or rather failed to launch for a half hour) on Twitter yesterday.  That's exactly what Kal and others are referring to.

So, like was the announcement through Musk? Like, he personally was like retweeting DeSantis' announcement? 

Sorry, I don't use Twitter. I have no idea what happened and am just inferring based on what I've read here. I might have missed something about it reading through on my phone earlier, I just had/have no idea what y'all are talking about. 

You know I ain't no Muskie. All this stuff is gooberness to me. 

[DMC]

1 minute ago, Secretary of Eumenes said:

So, like was the announcement through Musk? Like, he personally was like retweeting DeSantis' announcement? 

I'm not on Twitter either, but yes, Musk hosted it via his account on Twitter Spaces.  It kept on crashing until he transferred the even over to David Sacks' account, and when they got the event back up it literally was Musk who personally apologized for the difficulties.

I mean, I'm not very "online" either, but this has been reported literally everywhere on the internet for the last 24 hours.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

It seems Ken Paxton, the Texas AG who brought on of the Cases rejected by the SCOTUS to try to overturn Biden’s win, is being recommended for impeachment by a Republican controlled committee of the Texas House of Representatives:

 

[Mindwalker]

Also, Musk is in an official campaign video. Which is so bad it's kind of hilarious. But anyway, you could almost think he was running for VP rather than being his sponsor/ donor/ daddy/ whatever.

ETA: It may not be an official video, but one made by sympathizers. Will check tomorrow, I'm tired.

Edited May 25 by Mindwalker

[Tywin et al.]

42 minutes ago, DMC said:

I'm not on Twitter either, but yes, Musk hosted it via his account on Twitter Spaces. 

How does this work with campaign contribution rules by the way? Obviously it was a disaster, but I'd think this should qualify as a gift of value.

 

17 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

It seems Ken Paxton, the Texas AG who brought on of the Cases rejected by the SCOTUS to try to overturn Biden’s win, is being recommended for impeachment by a Republican controlled committee of the Texas House of Representatives:

 

It can't be as bad as the best quote in modern American politics:

Quote

I could not lose unless I was caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.

 

[DMC]

8 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

How does this work with campaign contribution rules by the way? Obviously it was a disaster, but I'd think this should qualify as a gift of value.

Well, this would assume the FEC isn't entirely toothless.  Frankly, the FCC too for that matter.  Things like CNN's Trump's town hall used to be avoided due to the FCC's equal time rule, but no one's worried about that for decades.

[Tywin et al.]

33 minutes ago, DMC said:

Well, this would assume the FEC isn't entirely toothless.  Frankly, the FCC too for that matter.  Things like CNN's Trump's town hall used to be avoided due to the FCC's equal time rule, but no one's worried about that for decades.

Fair points. I guess my complaint would be if the owner of CNN ran it. Musk using his platform to help launch a candidacy stinks of the highest levels of corruption and lack of ethics. We shouldn't let these things go unchecked.

Pretty funny it did crash though, which is on brand for both of those clowns. 

[Rippounet]

Saw that far-right leader Stewart Rhodes was sentenced to 18 years for January 6 today. Couldn't help wonder whether the next Republican president will be enough of a nutjob to pardon him shortly after taking office.

[TrackerNeil]

I don't want to do too much prediction, but so far 2024 seems to be shaping up for the Republicans much like 2016: A lot of non-Trump candidates who split the vote and allow Trump to win with a plurality. We'll see, I suppose. Maybe DeSantis splits the deplorable caucus, but I wonder how many MAGAs want to vote for Donald Trump but less amusing.*

*Obnoxious assholes find Trump amusing, so, you know.

[Zorral]

Quote

 

The sentencing today of Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes to 18 years in prison for seditious conspiracy for the Jan. 6 attack prompted me to dig into the TPM archives. We’ve been covering Rhodes and the Oath Keepers for a long time. But I couldn’t remember exactly how long. On closer look, I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was from virtually the beginning of his emergence on the national stage. But rummaging through our past coverage also helped me to re-familiarize myself with the context in which Rhodes founded the Oath Keepers.

Rhodes incorporated the Oath Keepers in 2009 (gee, who became president that year?), and you can’t divorce its creation from the then-emerging Tea Party movement.

The first mention of the Oath Keepers at TPM came in January 2010 in a story by Zachary Roth headlined: “Former Marine With Ties To Right-Wing Movements Charged With Child Rape, Possessing Grenade Launcher.” A lot going on there, no? Here’s an excerpt:

It’s not clear what Dyer might want with a grenade launcher. But he has declared himself a proud member of Oath Keepers, an organization that aims to enlist ex-military and law enforcement personnel, and has stoked fears that the federal government may try to seize Americans’ guns and round people up into concentration camps.

In this video, Dyer appears at a Tea Party event to promote the Oath Keepers and to rail against what the group — perhaps uniquely — sees as the federal government’s overzealous response to Hurricane Katrina.

A month later, in February 2010, Stewart Rhodes made his first appearance at TPM in a story by Eric Kleefeld about a Tea Party candidate for Texas governor in the GOP primary against incumbent Gov. Rick Perry and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison:

Debra Medina, the Tea Party activist and candidate in the Texas Republican gubernatorial primary who has attracted attention for her favorable comments about 9/11 Truthers and Birthers, is also involved with another extreme ideological movement: The Oath Keepers.

Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Daily News points out that Medina will appear this Sunday at an event in San Antonio, called “Taking Back Texas.” The other two top-billed speakers are Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers movement, and Oather activist Richard Mack, a former sheriff of Graham County, Arizona.

You can see in each of those initial stories the adjacency, to put it charitably, of the Oath Keepers and the Tea Party, with a little birtherism and 9/11 trutherism thrown in for good measure. I’m not suggesting TPM was alone at the time in covering the flourishing of right-wing extremism, but to this day I don’t think it’s as widely understood as it should be that the cauldron of racial grievance, white resentment, transgressive extra-constitutionalism, and conspiracizing in 2009-10 was a precursor to the Trump presidency and ultimately to Jan. 6.

Our first closer look at Rhodes himself came a few days later in a story by Jillian Rayfield – “Too Extreme For O’Reilly? The Man Behind The Right-Wing Group ‘Oath Keepers’” – that pivoted off an appearance by Rhodes on Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor.* Keep in mind here that less than a year after founding the Oath Keepers, Rhodes is being elevated into a primetime appearance on Fox News’ most popular show:

The Oath Keepers have some connections to the Tea Party movement, which itself has gained a lot of traction within the conservative movement. For one thing, Oath Keepers is part of the Friends for Liberty coalition, an umbrella group for such Tea Party-friendly movements as Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project and the John Birch Society. Rhodes is even on the planning committee for the 2010 9/12 Project. …

Also, notably, Oath Keepers has a booth at the ongoing CPAC conference in Washington, D.C., where they are handing out a DVD called “For Liberty: How the Ron Paul Revolution Watered the Withered Tree of Liberty” (the ties between the group and Ron Paul don’t stop there – Rhodes himself is a former member of Paul’s D.C. staff, according to his Oath Keeper’s bio page).

CPAC. Glenn Beck. The John Birch Society. Ron Paul. The point isn’t that all the ingredients were there for what became seditious conspiracy. It’s not as simple as a pinch of Ron Paul and a dollop of Birchers and a cup of Tea Party and presto you have a coup. Rather, the point is that conservatism in America, or what passed for it in its various manifestations, went off the rails more than a decade before the events of Jan. 6. Barack Obama’s election was, we all know, a catalyzing event. But it didn’t start there, and it certainly didn’t start in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump.

There’s another little echo of that time in the archive. In the screenshot above from the O’Reilly-Rhodes interview, see the partial chyron? “CRASHED A SMALL PLANE INTO A TX OFFICE BUILDING.” That’s a reference to the suicide attack by 53-year-old Andrew Joseph Stack III, who had just flown his plane into an IRS office in Austin, killing an IRS employee and injuring several others. Coming less than a decade after 9/11, the attack sparked more of a nationwide reaction than you would expect now.

An angry, middle-aged white man with a grudge against the federal government turning violent and acting out his grievances. It’s a familiar tableau now, but there’s a certain naivete about right-wing extremism in the NYT report on the incident that persists to this day:

But in place of the typical portrait of a terrorist driven by ideology, Mr. Stack was described as generally easygoing, a talented amateur musician with marital troubles and a maddening grudge against the tax authorities. …

Within hours of the crash, before the death or even the identity of the pilot had been confirmed, officials ruled out any connection to terrorist groups or causes.

“The main thing I want to put out there is that this is an isolated incident here; there is no cause for alarm,” said the Austin police chief, Art Acevedo, in a televised news conference at midday. Asked how he could be sure, Mr. Acevedo said, “You have to take my word at it, don’t you?”

Now I should mention that in the Obama years, there was a strenuous effort to downplay, minimize and recast attacks like this one as not terrorism, a collective effort of law enforcement and politicians in the years after 9/11 to avoid the repercussions of something happening on their watch. But to put it bluntly, we collectively still don’t see these kinds of attacks as “driven by ideology.” A “maddening grudge,” as the NYT put it, is what exactly? If the attackers aren’t dark-skinned religious fundamentalists we put them in a different bucket. Stack was simply a man broken by the IRS, in the words of his wife’s stepfather:

“I knew Joe had a hang-up with the I.R.S. on account of them breaking him, taking his savings away,” said Jack Cook, the stepfather of Mr. Stack’s wife, in a telephone interview from his home in Oklahoma. “And that’s undoubtedly the reason he flew the airplane against that building. Not to kill people, but just to damage the I.R.S.”

In sentencing Rhodes today in a federal courtroom in DC across the street from the Capitol, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta denounced Rhodes in words rarely if ever heard here in America: “I dare say Mr. Rhodes, and I have never said this to anyone I have sentenced: You, sir, present an ongoing threat and a peril to this country, the republic and the very fabric of democracy.”

_________________________

*If you’re interested, here’s our clip at the time from that Bill O’Reilly interview with Rhodes:

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/who-is-stewart-rhodes

 

 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Ken Paxton seems to be in serious trouble.  The Republican dominated Texas House of Representatives just did this: