Clear and Present Danger

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis hasn’t officially entered the Republican presidential primary yet, but some of his supporters are taking steps to work around his lacking social skills.

Multiple sources told The Daily Beast the Florida governor struggles with basic social skills, and his allies are working in early primary states to structure events to prevent unexpected interactions between the public and a candidate who is off-putting at best and rude at worst.

“He would sit in meetings and eat in front of people, always like a starving animal who has never eaten before,” a former DeSantis staffer told The Daily Beast, “getting sh*t everywhere.”

At a Palm Beach donor retreat late last month, an attendee stood up and heckled him as “DeSatan,” according to Republican sources, and an Iowa caucus-goer posed for a photo with DeSantis holding a paper snowflake with the word “fascist” carved into it, but even those who wish to smooth the path at events have found staffers have taken on the governor’s standoffishness.

“Easily the least responsive campaign I’ve ever dealt with,” said one veteran event host in an early primary state. “We invite, invite, invite, ping, ping, ping. We don’t hear anything.”

DeSantis apparently used bike racks to wall himself off from the public during his Iowa visit, which one New Hampshire ally noticed.

“If they want 50 bike racks, we’ll give them 50 bike racks,” said a New Hampshire GOP legislator.

Three former staffers described DeSantis as merely “quiet” and prefers a “very small” orbit, but one top New Hampshire Republican said only Newt Gingrich was a bigger “nightmare” to handle.

“He’s been tighter in his requests than other candidates,” that Republican said.

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Rude, crude, and stupid . . . is all it takes to be a Republican Presidential candidate.

 

 

 

Following the election of a black man as President, two “Tea Parties” formed at the end of the Virginia peninsula known as “The Northern Neck.”

1. The “99th District Tea Party” took its name from the Virginia 99th House of Delegates District.  Folded in 2016 after then-president Don Johnson went off his rocker and pissed off most the members.  The 99th DTP had been failing for several months.
2.  The “Montross Tea Party” took its name from the town of Montross in Westmoreland County.  They failed in 2016 after posting this plea on their website:

Our Board of Directors have been concerned for sometime on the drop of attendance at our Regular Tuesday night meetings. Our last meeting the attendance was 6.  We understand that we have members that are out of town and others that do not drive after dark especially in the winter and others that are working hard and just can’t make the meetings.

It is getting hard to get speakers and not fair to get speakers for only 6-10 members.  We have asked for input from our members.  The only input we have received is from our lively open discussions at meetings.

We are not going to roll over and let the Montross Tea Party die!  But we need to do something.  After two Board Meetings and a long agonizing debate this is our solution for now.  We are going to suspend our Tuesday night meetings for the time being.  This is effective the 8^th of February.  The Board can call regular meetings as necessary.

In 2021, a notice appeared on the old Montross Tea Party Facebook page stating:

The Montross Tea Party is now the Northern Neck Patriots.

Turns out the “Northern Neck Patriots” are headed by a self-appointed holyroller preacher who was tossed out of the Navy for refusing to get the COVID vaccine.  The few members are a rag-tag bunch, some former Montross Tea Party members, some attracted to the “Patriot” name.  The “Northern Neck Patriots” website and Facebook page are simple, no information, rarely updated.

Turns out the main –some have said the only — activity by the “Northern Neck Patriots” has been to protest at the Northern Neck Regional Jail, Warsaw VA where several of the armed coup thugs from January 6, 2021, were housed awaiting trial.  Turns out the “Patriots” are convinced the Jan 6 thugs are true patriots who are now being persecuted as “political prisoners”.  The “Patriots” don’t have much of a track record — turns out that of the seven initial Jan 8 thugs supported by the “Patriots”, four have already been sentenced (7 years, 7 years, 51 months, and 1 year) while three have been found guilty (or pled guilty) and are awaiting sentencing.

The “Northern Neck Patriots” are not particularly respected in the area — for example:

• Former members of the Montross Tea Party unanimously do not like the “Patriots” and refuse to have anything to do with them.
• In November 2022, the “Patriots” approached every county Republican Party on the Northern Neck, asking to be appointed as “Official Representatives” so they could go into polling places and stay to “observe” election procedures.  Every Republican Party turned them down.
• At least two county Republican Parties have thrown “Patriots” out of their membership.
• “Patriots” show up at a lot of County Supervisors’ meetings where they speak in the public comments period.  Their comments are a mixture of nonsense, bullshit, and rightwing pipe dreams.

More than 1,000 additional people could still face charges in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol, according to a letter to the DC federal court from the US attorney in Washington.

The one-page letter, which was reviewed by Bloomberg News, was sent late last year to the chief judge and hasn’t been previously reported. It offers details on what Attorney General Merrick Garland has called “one of the largest, most complex, and most resource-intensive investigations in our history.”

Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-15/doj-told-court-to-expect-a-deluge-of-new-jan-6-prosecutions?utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_source=twitter&cmpid%3D=socialflow-twitter-politics&utm_medium=social&utm_content=politics

We all know about the tape recordings of Trump’s attempts to force the Georgia Governor and Secretary of State to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential election in Georgia.

Now, we find there is ANOTHER TAPE

THIS is the man who was just arrested for child sex crimes. Was he in drag reading in libraries? No.

Surprise, surprise, he was a YOUTH PASTOR. For a church. In Texas. But was he the only pastor in America arrested recently for this charge? No. Not even close.

On July 22, 2022, a jury found Chad Michael Rider, 49, of Anna, Texas guilty of three counts of sexually exploiting children.

Rider was sentenced by a U.S. District Judge on Wednesday to 60 years in prison.

Was he the only pastor arrested and sentenced for child sex abuse?  Hardly.  In the past two weeks, two more pastors IN THE SAME TEXAS COUNTY were arrested on similar charges.

 

Last year Marjorie Taylor Greene was featured speaker at a white supremacist even where her fellow speakers praised Hitler and called for Dr. Fauci to be hanged.  The crowd shouted “Putin!! Putin!!” as bombs dropped on Ukraine.

And now Kavein McCarthy has given her a seat on the Homeland Security Committee, complete with security clearance.

I’ve said it before, will say it again:  REPUBLICANS ARE THE THREAT TO THIS NATION.

Evangelicals were driven to support former President Donald Trump out of fear of their “demographic slide” and their impending loss of political and cultural relevance, argued Robert P. Jones for Religion News Service on Tuesday — and several points of data suggest that their fear is justified.

“After a long life spanning nearly two hundred and forty years, White Christian America — a prominent cultural force in the nation’s history — has died,” wrote Jones. “WCA first began to exhibit troubling symptoms in the 1960s when white mainline Protestant denominations began to shrink, but showed signs of rallying with the rise of the Christian Right in the 1980s. Following the 2004 presidential election, however, it became clear that WCA’s powers were failing.”

Jones, who wrote “The End of White Christian America” just prior to Trump winning the 2016 election thanks in part to the overwhelming vote of white evangelicals, argued that the demographic information was clear then — and clear now: “The data I had available at the time identified a watershed event that was driving this desperate movement: The U.S. had become — for the first time in our history — a country that was, demographically speaking, no longer a majority white Christian country.”

Public Religion Research Institute in 2022 found that just 27.5 percent of Americans identify as White Protestants — and just 13.6 percent identify as White evangelicals — down from 23 percent in 2006, wrote Jones. Meanwhile, the data are even more dramatic when broken down by generation; just 9 percent of Americans 18-29 are White evangelicals, and a plurality, 38 percent, are religiously unaffiliated.

This shift has been dramatic in the population at large, but much less so in the GOP; 8 in 10 Republicans identified as some form of White Christian in 2006, versus 7 in 10 now. “If we overlay the current ethno-religious composition of our two political parties onto the generational cohort chart, we see a stunning result,” wrote Jones. “In terms of its racial and religious composition, the Democratic Party looks like 20-year-old America, while the Republican Party looks like 80-year-old America.”

“[Evangelicals’] steadfast allegiance to Trump’s MAGA vision — actually increasing their support for him between 2016 and 2020 — and their unwillingness to denounce either Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen or the violence on Jan. 6” have made clear that they will not accept minority status in America, wrote Jones. “The continued demographic decline makes it clear that the MAGA goal of reestablishing their vision of a white Christian America can’t be realized by democratic means. But … I’m deeply concerned that the embrace of Christian nationalism by nearly two-thirds of white evangelicals and a majority of the Republican Party will spawn more theological monstrosities justifying anti-democratic schemes to achieve this end.”