Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The GOP is a fucking disgrace.

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

I didn’t have alien invasion on my 2023 BINGO card.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

White supremacy is terrorism.

No one could have predicted…

Optimism opens the door to great things.

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

This blog will pay for itself.

Chutkan laughs. Lauro sits back down.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Republicans don’t trust women.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

The GOP couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

He seems like a smart guy, but JFC, what a dick!

He really is that stupid.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / Repub Venality Open Thread: Senator RonJon, Willing Putin Asset

Repub Venality Open Thread: Senator RonJon, Willing Putin Asset

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Stupid, apparently, but still bloody dangerous…

Reader Interactions

69Comments

  1. 1.

    SiubhanDuinne

    Wow. Stephanie Ruhle (sp?) just ripped a great big chunk out of Jim Justice’s ass! It was a thing of true beauty.

  2. 2.

    SiubhanDuinne

    And Ron Johnson is a traitor, pure and simple. His stupidity is real, but it’s no defence for treason.

  6. 6.

    BC in Illinois

    Here is an idea that has merit:

    We should embrace relegation, in the fashion of the premier league.

    Wisconsin should be relegated to Territory for a bit, and DC promoted.

    A polity that elects Johnson is clearly in need of playing at a less challenging level and sorting themselves out.

    [From I Tried on Twitter, responding to Tom Nichols’s tweet, above.]

  7. 7.

    jonas

    I think @popehat summed up how a lot of us are feeling right now:

    It continues to vex me that society is being destroyed by the dumbest fucking people God ever made

  9. 9.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @JPL:

    I hope I can find the clip later. Would love to see it again, and to share with those less-fortunate jackals who missed it earlier.

  12. 12.

    Ken

    @Amir Khalid: Yeah, but that’s just the politics of its founder. As a corporation, Penzey’s recognizes that the GQP as it currently exists is an existential threat to their market, which requires healthy people with surplus income, and ideally who are willing to leave their homes and shop for spices.

  14. 14.

    What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?

    @BC in Illinois: I’ve been a proponent of the argument that if DC is not big enough to be a State, then any current State with a population less than DC is also too small to be a State, and should be forced to revert to a territory or merge with another adjacent State – i.e. Wyoming could become Wydaho or Montoming, or the territory of Wyoming.

  15. 15.

    Another Scott

    [klaxon][flashing-blue-light]

    NEW: @POTUS and @FLOTUS confirm there will soon be a First Cat at the White House. "She is waiting in the wings."

    In their NBC interview, the First Lady said that they took Major to a shelter that had cats to see how he interacted with them, and "he did fine."

    — Sara Cook (@saraecook) April 30, 2021

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  17. 17.

    Other MJS

    The comment editor works properly for me with Chrome but not Firefox — I can’t initiate comments in Visual mode at all. Has anyone identified add-ins that cause this or is it fundamental to Firefox? Thanks!

  21. 21.

    JaneE

    Johnson may be stupid, but chances are he was all in favor of running point for the Russians.  Anything to hurt the Democrats, even conspiring with a hostile foreign power, is acceptable to most Republicans these days.  The more the demographics work against them, the more openly they will work with anyone hostile to America, starting with authoritarian regimes.   They have been hostile to democracy for a long time now, and the laws they are passing in Georgia and Florida and elsewhere demonstrate just how hostile they are.

  22. 22.

    The Moar You Know

    He knows perfectly well what he’s doing.  Don’t chalk up his actions to stupidity.

  23. 23.

    BCHS Class of 1980

    The phrasing in the above post just made me realize that RonJon is in fact Bloody Stupid Johnson! The late Sir Terry of Pratchett warned us many moons ago.

  24. 24.

    narya

    @Amir Khalid:  Yes, and one of the ones they mentioned today was Tsardust Seasoning, a spice mix with salt, garlic, cinnamon, pepper, nutmeg, & marjoram. I don’t normally buy spice mixes, but over the last year have been enjoying several of them–Sate, Rogan Josh, Vindaloo, and Bombay, in particular. I throw some into my nightly beans + rice + some other veggie mixture, and most of the ones listed go very nicely with butternut squash cubes and sweet potato cubes.

  27. 27.

    WaterGirl

    @Amir Khalid:   @zhena gogolia:

    I was so angry in December 2016 that I turned Christmas that year into “spice Christmas”.  I gave all my Trump-voting-or-I-voted-third-party family members collections of spices from Penzeys for Christmas instead of the kinds of gifts I would usually give.

  28. 28.

    VOR

    @Ken: There is a Penzey’s retail store in a nearby city. I was looking for an obscure spice and checked 6 different local supermarkets to no avail. I called Penzey’s and they asked “which type?” Wait, there’s more than one kind of that? And you have both in stock?

    Their store smells heavenly.

  29. 29.

    RaflW

    Joseph McCarthy
    Ron Johnson

    What’s in the water in Wisconsin? Or does eating a lot of bratwurst clog some people’s brains?

  30. 30.

    dnfree

    @RaflW: Wisconsin was once a liberal stronghold.  The Republican Party originated there.  As an Illinois resident, I don’t know what happened to the Wisconsin of my youth, or to the Iowa of my youth.

  31. 31.

    Chris Johnson

    If you want to see how real ‘Russiagate’ is, try being an extreme leftwinger posting on Reddit about it.

    Coordinated troll brigades issuing forth hundreds of downvotes within minutes to get your remark ‘invisible’ as fast as humanly possible. Coordinated troll brigades issuing forth hundreds of upvotes to support plants dropping talking points about how the word ‘Russiagate’ is the mad fantasy of a bunch of irredeemable liberals who are just the same as the rightwingers.

    There’s a LOT of power and attention going into management of some of these spaces and if you were a leftie (at one point, DSA member, rose twitter identifier!) you got stepped on HARD if you veered from the Moscow party line. They can’t directly control everybody but by God can they ever manage informal social groups subject to moderation/voting or other such mechanisms. I’m sure there are 24/7 shifts going on, from before 2016 right up to today.

    ‘Russiagate’ is a tip-off. There are certain narratives they absolutely cannot allow.

    Don’t ever add voting here.

  32. 32.

    Nicole

    Oh, Jim Justice.  Just be honest, and say that trying to fix what really ails West Virginia is toooo haaaarrrrd, and this was an easy way to ensure bigots could feel better about their miserable lives and so will keep voting for him.

  34. 34.

    Obvious Russian Troll

    @RaflW: Wisconsin’s other senator is Tammy Baldwin.

    Wisconsin is highly polarized. There are some areas that are fairly liberal (such as Madison and Milwaukee), but there are some highly conservative areas as well (such as the Fox Valley, home of Joe McCarthy). As in most places, rural areas tend to vote for Republicans as well.

    Thanks to gerrymandering, the state legislature is Republican-dominated and has been successful in suppressing the vote.

    I haven’t lived there for a while but as an expat I still vote in federal elections.

  35. 35.

    Chris Johnson

    I might add that I’ve seen this recently. Tucker Carlson’s mask thing got some real interesting responses on Reddit (breadtube, specifically). You can get a little Chrome extension that shows a red flag next to posters who repeatedly post in super-MAGA subreddits, and I use it…

    A user (and r/the_donald poster) posted this:

    What is it about wearing masks during a pandemic that has so aggravated and terrified these people?

    More than six HUNDRED upvotes in a discussion that sees only maybe ten or so as a rule, in a subreddit with about three or four hundred TOTAL at any one time.

    Why would Russian troll farms want to push that narrative?

    Because we’re not supposed to see that Tucker is trying to rile up the LEFT to respond violently to the MAGAs, while also trying to goad MAGAs into doing something stupid and violent. If the left and people on the whole stick to getting their shots and wearing their masks and not being crazy, the energy goes out of the crazy right wingers.

    Because they need us, the non-MAGA, to present the appearance of the monsters they say we are, so they need us flipping out. So, maximizing the response to these suggestions of anti-mask violence and trying to get us to see it as ‘the MAGAs are CRAAAAZYYYY’ rather than ‘they are being stage managed, as are we, to create a fight that wouldn’t naturally be as violent’.

    Sometimes you can see the puppet strings. Russiagate is fuckin’ real as hell. It’s the new world warfare, and it matters.

  36. 36.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @VOR:

    I only just learned that there’s a Penzey’s retail shop not far from where I live. I am beginning to think that a visit there would be an excellent way to celebrate getting fully vaccinated in a couple of weeks! A treat, and something to look forward to.

  37. 37.

    Chris Johnson

    @Chris Johnson:

    …that and, if you rephrase the literal question in the form of ‘what is the terrifying truth about mask wearing liberals’ you get dumped straight into Russia’s QAnon pipeline…

     

    Oh, also, still enjoying the Mala Market Chinese hot peppers and hua jiao I got thanks to comments here :) not to be too intense, even though some of this stuff is a big deal!

  38. 38.

    Cameron

    @Chris Johnson: I think Russian interference in our government (not just elections) is real – how could it be anything else, given that we see all kinds of actors trying to monkey with the USA? I also think that the Republican Party is even more toxic than Russia, and probably harder to stop. We can develop the capabilities of fighting back against Russia; I don’t know what we do with Republicans.

  42. 42.

    Mike in NC

    Why do Republicans love Putin? Because he’s deeply racist and openly mocked Obama. Putin is also opposed to Islam and other ‘foreign’ religions. Under Putin, being gay/lesbian/trans is illegal. Protesters in Russia are generally brutally put down. Putin controls the media. Republicans were mostly OK with installing Fat Bastard as the American Putin, a dictator for life. States controlled by Republicans are trying to keep people from voting and protesting police brutality. They are passing unconstitutional laws and doing everything to emulate Putin.

  43. 43.

    Old School

    @SiubhanDuinne:

    I only just learned that there’s a Penzey’s retail shop not far from where I live.

    You might want to double-check before you go.  The ones in my area are not open for in-store shopping yet.  I believe you can place an order online and pick-up curbside.

  45. 45.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Old School:

    Oh, thanks! Yes, I will check first. It’s not all that far, but it is far enough that it would be vexing to get there and find I couldn’t go in.

  48. 48.

    narya

    @SiubhanDuinne: Back in the day, they had very few stores–it was nearly all online (and there is a weird exception for Chicago, where they cannot have stores, which I can tell you about if you care). For awhile, they would do polls to determine where they should open a new bricks-and-mortar store.

  50. 50.

    gvg

    The Penzey’s closest to me has closed in Jan 2020. It looks like they are doing better on line. The website says they are all just curbside still.

  51. 51.

    S. Cerevisiae

    I absolutely love Penzys spices, they are all I buy now. I haven’t been to one of their stores but I can just imagine how wonderful it must smell. They often have good specials if you get their emails.

  52. 52.

    J R in WV

    @Nicole:  ​
    Jim Justice can’t run for Governor again… 2 term limit in effect here.

    For many years Big Jim Justice has been a volunteer coach for Secondary School girls’ basketball teams in his local county school system of Greenbrier county. He has estates in other places being a wealthy guy who doesn’t pay his bills or taxes… but that’s where he’s registered to vote.

    So maybe he thinks he’s protecting the “girls” from competition from trans girls… or maybe he is both homophobic and transphobic, those seem to go hand-in-hand pretty commonly. Despicable people.

    At least he’s done one of the better jobs dealing with the Trumpian Plague out of all the Republikkkan governors. Mask wearing was close to 100% for quite a while, will still be for us!

  53. 53.

    J R in WV

    @narya: ​
     

    …there is a weird exception for Chicago, where they [Penzeys] cannot have stores, which I can tell you about if you care). For awhile, they would do polls to determine where they should open a new bricks-and-mortar store.

    Ooh, please inform me about weird commercial exceptions~!!~

  54. 54.

    narya

    @WaterGirl: There’s one in Evanston, and there used to be one in Oak Park, but NOT in Chicago proper, There’s a Chicago place–The Spice House, or something like that–that’s owned by a different family member, IIRC. Basically, they had a family dispute over the original store, and the agreement was that the family member who ended up with the Penzey’s name could not operate/open a store in Chicago.

  56. 56.

    WaterGirl

    @narya: Hmmm. I was definitely in a Penzey’s in a bigger city – if it wasn’t Chicago, I will have to check with the friend I went with to see where we were!

  59. 59.

    J R in WV

    @narya:

    OK. That’s not weird, really. Just a compromise in a family trying to share split a business.

    My uncle and my dad had a falling out over their individual management of two separate pieces of the family business, which resulted in the sale of the whole shebang to a competitor elsewhere in the state.

    This turned out to be a blessing in disguise as they sold at the peak of the market for newspaper companies, which has since crashed badly… totally in fact. Although we all hated that it worked out like that at the time. It was the best possible outcome… actually.

  60. 60.

    satby

    @rikyrah: In fact Naperville is 50 miles or so west of Chicago. But Oak Park and Evanston border Chicago seamlessly, so WG might have gone to one of those.

  61. 61.

    satby

    @J R in WV: Same story about Dove and Cupid candy companies in Chicago, both owned by the same family but split up into separate entities after a family disagreement.

  63. 63.

    WaterGirl

    @rikyrah:

    Naperville is not Chicago

    I know that!  :-)

    When she said there was no store in Chicago, I thought it might have been on the shopping trip we took, another time, in Naperville.

  64. 64.

    WaterGirl

    @satby: It was somewhere with a Pottery Barn and at least one of the high-end cooking stores, and I know I have been to those stores in both Chicago and in Naperville.

  65. 65.

    joel hanes

    @dnfree:
    I don’t know what happened to the Wisconsin of my youth, or to the Iowa of my youth.
    $$$$ -> Paul Weyrich -> Jerry Falwell/Moral Majority -> abortion as wedge issue -> politicization of evangelical Protestantism
    + panic over gay marriage
    + 40 years of GOP racist dogwhistles
    – liberal, tolerant young people (who leave the state after college)
    =  Republican electorate dominated by Christianist bigots who vote in every election down to dogcatcher, and who nominate the most right-wing candidate in every GOP primary

    Special Iowa addendum:
    Robert Vander Plaats
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Vander_Plaats

    Wisconsin extra credit:
    look up Robin Vos, Scott Fitzgerald​

  66. 66.

    Geminid

    @joel hanes: I kind of hope Johnson runs for reelection. He’s carrying some scandle-baggage. And, not to be lookist, Johnson looks like someone I would cast as a corrupt politician in a tv miniseries.

    And Republican Congressman Mike Gallegher (WI-8) is waiting in the wings. A 37 year-old retired Marine Corp Captain, Gallagher is a young man in hurry. His tenure has coincided with a new naval shipbuilding operation in his district, where an Italian company is building small warships on the shores of Green Bay. Gallagher might be somewhat tougher to beat than Johnson.

    Base motivation and turnout will likely be more consequential than candidate quality in Wisconsin next year, though. This will definitely be a race to watch. Along with Ohio’s Senate race, Wisconsin’s will be a good gauge of where Midwestern voters are going.

  67. 67.

    Geminid

    @WaterGirl: In following northern Illinois politicians like new Representatives Underwood and Casten, I’ve run into the term “Chicago-Land.” Its seems like a media and advertising thing.                                     But Chicago-Land does roll off the tongue better than “Greater Chicago Metropolitan Area.” It even sounds a little magical, at least from a distance.

  69. 69.

    JohnC

    I don’t know of a Penzey’s in Evanston – could you mean the Evanston location of “The Spice House” on Central? The Chicago “The Spice House” is in the Old Town neighborhood.@narya:

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