Pennsylvania Republican Senate candidate Jeff Bartos says rival Sean Parnell, endorsed by Donald Trump mere days ago, is "unelectable" because of past protection-from-abuse orders Mr. Parnell's wife filed against him during their divorce. Mr. Parnell denies everything, despite documents attesting to the existence of these orders (if not their precipitating events), and, more importantly, he shows both rage and self-pity in his denial, and thus you have the two reasons Donald Trump endorsed him and the two reasons his votaries will fight to the death for him. So Mr. Bartos doesn't look "desperate" so much as he looks like an accomplice. If Mr. Parnell winds up facing Conor Lamb in the 2022 Senate race, I bet he wins -- he only lost the PA-17 House race to Mr. Lamb by two points in 2020. I can think of at least one way to avoid that result (cough John Fetterman cough).
Facebook wants to start a digital wallet app, and wants you to know that they know there's a "trust deficit" with our federal regulators, at least, though they don't take any of the blame for that. The 150 million Americans who lost their personal info in the last Facebook data breach might blame Facebook for this "trust deficit"! And Facebook executive David Marcus alternates between sounding like an abusive domestic partner ("this time you can trust me, pinky swear!") and a man who can't stop telling you how much smarter than you he thinks he is ("you may not know you want blockchain, but you do!"). Between all that and his resemblance to Rahm Emanuel, he may have just become my least favorite American. (Hate to pile on, but "if I could redo it all over again" is redundant, and a sign that he knows he's shilling snake oil.)
California Republican gubernatorial candidate Caitlin Jenner says that she "supports a woman's right to choose" but she also supports a state "having the ability to make their own laws," meaning that she's somehow both pro-choice and a supporter of Texas's anti-abortion law SB 8. That argument's so gob-smackingly awful it may have stunned the CNN anchor into failing to ask a follow-up question like "so a state could reinstate Black slavery, then, because it has a right to 'make its own laws'?" California's far right -- which still exists and is still quite obnoxious -- won't be happy with either her "disagreement" with the law or her hedging about it, which may be why California Republicans have turned their attention to Larry Elder in the gubernatorial recall race.
Speaking of which! Larry Elder tells Candace Owens this about reparations: "When people talk about reparations, do they really want to have that conversation? Like it or not, slavery was legal. Their legal property was taken away from them after the Civil War, so you could make an argument that the people that are owed reparations are not only just Black people but also the people whose ‘property’ was taken away after the end of the Civil War." I must say that playing devil's advocate is something you should really grow out of by the time you're, say, 23; but Larry Elder is three times that age now. Let me also say that if (as he suggests) the price of avoiding a Civil War would have been paying off the Southern slaveowners, then give me Civil War, because some things are worth going to war over.
After signing a heinous abortion bill and a heinous vote suppression bill a mere seven months after mismanaging a winter storm about as badly as a Governor can, Texas Governor Greg Abbott's approvals are underwater, for once -- 41% approve and 50% disapprove, the latter number revealing his vulnerability. Sadly, he will get re-elected in 2022, if Democrats once again run a do-nothing candidate who "fits the state" and "can win" but mostly just walks on eggshells around right-wingers. If you must talk to right-wingers at all, you talk to them directly, and if they whine about it afterward, that's their problem.
Finally, not long after returning to West Virginia from a possible plane trip to see Mitch McConnell in Lexington, KY, Joe Manchin has declared that he won't accept a budget reconciliation bill over $1.5 trillion. He already voted for the $3.5 trillion budget blueprint last month; so much for keeping one's word, eh? So yeah, no Medicare expansion, no paid family leave, no care economy expansion, no renewable energy spending, no getting lead pipes out of our water system, all because the One True Great and Real American President Joe Manchin worries about inflation. But if over $5 trillion, in deficit spending, over a mere nine months only hiked the inflation rate to 5% -- and I don't say that it actually did -- how would $4.5 trillion, in paid-for spending, over 10 years, cause inflation to "run away" from us? I hate it when horseshit wins. Obviously we need to be a lot louder.
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