Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans: “Abortion is murder but you can take a bus to get one.” Easy peasy.

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

Mediocre white men think RFK Jr’s pathetic midlife crisis is inspirational. The bar is set so low for them, it’s subterranean.

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

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

When we show up, we win.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. keep building.

If you can’t control your emotions, someone else will.

The press swings at every pitch, we don’t have to.

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

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

The world has changed, and neither one recognizes it.

“They all knew.”

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Giving up is unforgivable.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

We can’t confuse what’s necessary to win elections with the policies that we want to implement when we do.

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Come on, man.

You are here: Home / Politics / GOP Death Cult / GOP Death Cult Open Thread: Sen. RonJon Is A Malevolent Moron

GOP Death Cult Open Thread: Sen. RonJon Is A Malevolent Moron

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Surely you guys can do better, Wisconsin!

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94Comments

  5. 5.

    jackmac

    Never understood the appeal of Ron Johnson. This guy reminds me of a used car salesperson (and nobody likes those guys). Then again, Wisconsin had collectively had taken leave of its senses in recent elections. I mean, how do you toss out a good senator like Democrat Russ Feingold?

  6. 6.

    Mike in NC

    Recall that The Donald suggested letting COVID-19 “wash over” the country and kill upwards of 5 million people because he was too lazy to take it seriously until he got sick. A great pity that it didn’t kill him.

  8. 8.

    Chief Oshkosh

    So where are the headlines that blare “Wisconsin Republican Senator supports plan to kill 50 million men, women, and children!”?

  9. 9.

    Low Key Swagger

    @rikyrah: Because the community has, post-verdict and sentencing, “experienced a sense of Justice and peace”?

    Do they want it to stop?  It really frosts me that they are doing it under the guise of “integrity of the process”.

  14. 14.

    Chief Oshkosh

    @rikyrah: Ha! Admitting to being an accomplice to a crime while at the same time telling the prosecutor that his accomplices committed a crime.

    Gotta hand it to these Einsteins, they’re efficient!

  16. 16.

    bbleh

    Well, paraphrasing I don’t remember who, if there were no morons in Congress, it would not be a representative body.

  17. 17.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    Oh look at the bean counter Johnson giving medical advice. He’s so cute when he talks like that.

  19. 19.

    Ruckus

    @rikyrah:

    Maybe he’s too stupid to understand that there are 3 parts to the top tier of the federal government as a check against one of the others going batshit insane and trying to over throw the government. Or maybe he was in on the overthrow…

    I’m going with C. Both of the Above.

  20. 20.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    @rikyrah:

    In an unusual series of reply filings, Brooks—who is representing himself in the matter—claimed his incendiary speech during Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally at the Ellipse fell within the scope of his duty as a member of Congress. However, the lawmaker also noted that he has been “faithful to his wife” of 45 years, has never received a speeding ticket or smoked tobacco, and that none of his four children have been divorced.

    “I’m a faithful follower of Brother John Birch, and I belong to the Antioch Baptist Church and I ain’t even got a garage; you can call home and ask my wife!”

  23. 23.

    West of the Rockies

    So Republicans think Trump’s taxes should remain private but the identities of jurors should be public.  Well, looking for logic among a herd of sociopaths is foolish.

  24. 24.

    Ken

    @bbleh:  Parody is unfortunately dead…

    UK MP William Stones: “There’s an awful lot of bleeding idiots out there among the voters, and they deserve some representation too.”

    US Senator Roman Hruska: “Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they, and a little chance?”

  29. 29.

    hueyplong

    Not sure there is anything I’d change about that Brooks filing.

    That’s not an especially good thing for Mo.

  30. 30.

    Sure Lurkalot

    Rep. Mo Brooks Tells Judge He Was Simply ‘Cooperating’ with the ‘White House’.

    Truth AND Consequences, please.

  33. 33.

    bbleh

    @Ruckus: one must give Republicans credit for working by far the harder to achieve a proper representation of morons in Congress.  Of course, in this they are representing the interests of their voters.

  35. 35.

    Dan B

    @Chief Oshkosh: And the 50 million dead were out of a population that is now 7 times larger than 1918 – 1919.  350 millionn dead is the population of the US.

    Reporters, please ask Johnson if the death of all Amerucan citizens is acceptable.

  36. 36.

    David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch

    Surely you guys can do better, Wisconsin!

    they elected joe mccarthy twice and would have elected him a third time had he not died from alcoholism.

  40. 40.

    Dan B

    @rikyrah: And an attorney was accused by a bank teller at his bank in San Diego that his check for $12,000 was stolen (or fake.. can’t find reference).

    The outrages are endless and white people get bent out of shape when any minority suggests they have been victimized.  They equate bad manners with abuse.

  43. 43.

    Peale

    @Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: and so the esteemed legal profession takes another step down. I’m very much starting to doubt that these are actually unusual filings. They seem to be quite common.

    The smugness about his children…gross.

    Time to track down his mistress. You know he has one since he brought up his fidelity without anyone asking.

  45. 45.

    sab

    @Dan B: My stepson knocked the side mirror off our Black neighbor’s car about 15 years ago. I paid for the damages with a check. When I got the cancelled check back I discovered that the bank had fingerprinted him in order to cash it! He never said a word about it.

  49. 49.

    Omnes Omnibus

    JFC.  A legislative committee in WI just played banning the UW system from requiring masks.  OTOH, the chancellor just issued a mask mandate – effectively saying “Sue me, bitch.”

  50. 50.

    Mallard Filmore

    @rikyrah:

     

    A Black realtor, his client, and the client’s 15-year-old son were all handcuffed during a home showing Sunday after a neighbor called 911 to report a break-in.

    That happened to me when I was house hunting, except for the handcuff part. But the realtor and I are honkies. Maybe that’s the difference.

  51. 51.

    Dan B

    @sab: One neighbor is a 50 something black guy in construction. He’s very good looking and doesn’t have any threatening vibes or defensive body language, in fact the opposite.  He’s done a lot of work for us over the years, feeds the cats when we’re out of town, and is laughing as often as he is talking.  He’s afraid to drive to the north end.  He confided that to me a month ago.  I’d wondered.  Most of our white friends are unaware.

  54. 54.

    JPL

    @sab:  Years ago, a friend and I met at a mall in Atlanta to watch a movie.  Before hand we went into a Sak’s and she purchased two St. John’s suits.   Even years ago they were pricey.  She had them hold them for her   After the movie she went to pick them up, and the first question was are you picking them up for….   Then they lost them.   Sak’s delivered them to her house the next day, but it  was too late.   She never entered the store again.

    A few years later though I had the opportunity to use the story.  I was working in another dept store’s crystal dept over Xmas, and a woman complained about the wait , and said she worked at Sak’s and that would never happer there.   I said I know so I was so surprised to see what happened to my black friend, and I told the story loud enough that the entire line could hear   After the woman left, the next in line, just looked at me and said wow .. you are good.

  56. 56.

    Just Chuck

    Uh, any bureau with the word “investigation” in their name generally does know more than they announce.  That’s sort of how investigations usually work.

  59. 59.

    sab

    @Dan B: My stepdaughter and her black husband lived in Seattle for about a year ten years ago. He grew up in inner city Cleveland. He thought the Seattle police were terrifying. Amateurs. He said everyone in Cleveland on both sides know the rules for interacting safely with the police. The Seattle police had no concept of how to interact with black people and were jumpy as hell.

  60. 60.

    Just Chuck

    @sab: Did he have an account at the bank?  It’s SOP for them to fingerprint if that’s not the case.

  62. 62.

    Peale

    @Baud: also there’s a whole bunch of other sins in the bible as well as laws that Brooks hasn’t denied. Maybe his kids aren’t divorced because they murder their spouses before they remarry. It’s fair to ask.

  63. 63.

    Kay

    Juan Melli
    @juanmelli
    ·4h
    “You are the ultimate knuckleheads and because of what you’re saying, people are losing their life”
    Preach
    @GovMurphy

    My new favorite thing is governors getting mad at anti-vaccers. Yesterday, Utah, today NJ.

    Covid is hard on a lot of people in government but hardest on governors and mayors. They must be so, so sick of this.

  64. 64.

    Another Scott

    @Peale: No doubt they secretly wear suits of wool and linen, and don’t have tassels at the four corners of their cloaks.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  66. 66.

    NotMax

    Three guesses where it went. The last two don’t count.

    A $5,800 bottle of Japanese whiskey given to then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo by Japan is missing, prompting an ongoing State Department inquiry to locate the spirits.

    The federal government disclosed the investigation on Wednesday in an obscure public notice listing gifts from foreign governments to American officials. The notice declares the disposition of the whiskey as unknown. Source

  67. 67.

    hrprogressive

    The *only* reason people like Johnson talk about letting a pandemic run their “natural course” is because, thru a combo of hubris (It can’t happen to me) and, more importantly, *privilege* (I have the resources to ensure it *won’t* happen to me)

    They are as confident as can be that, when the crisis concludes, they won’t be among the dead.

    That’s it.

  68. 68.

    hueyplong

    @Peale: Not a word from Mo about how he’s been chaste regarding goats.

    And before anyone says Mo claimed fidelity, we should be able to agree that someone who’d go carnal with a goat would be sure to claim that it doesn’t constitute infidelity to do so.

  69. 69.

    Ken

    @Peale: Maybe his kids aren’t divorced because they murder their spouses before they remarry. It’s fair to ask.

    Unless it’s a HIPPAA violation because they murder their spouses to harvest their organs and blood for into Republican politicians with bad hearts or livers destroyed by COVID.

  71. 71.

    Ken

    @hrprogressive: They are as confident as can be that, when the crisis concludes, they won’t be among the dead.

    So focused on the virus, they forget the angry mobs.

  72. 72.

    Scout211

    CNN has several legal experts who opine that the Florida executive order does not actually ban mask mandates in schools.  Interesting:

    cnn.com/2021/08/04/us/florida-school-mask-mandate-law/index.html

    But several legal experts told CNN the executive order does not actually ban mask mandates in schools and is more political speech than legal directive.
    “It is a loosely written riff on the governor’s political views on masking and parental rights chock-full of entirely unenforceable ‘Whereas’ clauses designed to garnish newspaper, television and Twitter soundbites, rather than judicial support in the event of inevitable lawsuits,” CNN legal analyst Paul Callan said.
    Columbia Law School professor Richard Briffault, who specializes in state and local government law, said similar.“The executive order is no more than a glorified press release telling Florida health and education officials to write rules that follow Florida law,” said Briffault.

    . . .

    Callan says while DeSantis is sending a strong message on masks, his views are not binding and his order is not likely to withstand a court challenge.
    “The executive order itself does not do anything that carries legal consequences,” said Briffault.
    “The (executive order) is actually pretty toothless in that all of the sections of law he invokes do not deprive the Department of Health of its power as the ultimate decision maker regarding measures necessary to inhibit the spread of communicable diseases as outlined in Section 1003.22(3) of Florida Statutes.”
    “It is highly unlikely that the courts would permit the state to withhold funding from school districts which insist on masking children as a necessary health measure particularly when the CDC recommends masking,” Callan said.
    Callan says opponents of the measure are likely to cite that under Article IX of the Florida Constitution, the state has a duty to educate all children.
    “Cutting off funding to districts which choose to require masking to prevent the spread of Covid-19, a potentially deadly communicable disease, would violate the states ‘paramount duty’ to educate all children, not just the unmasked,” Callan said.

  74. 74.

    Another Scott

    Meanwhile, … ScienceMag:

    When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, there was massive investment into the discovery of new treatments. Given the urgent need, repurposing of approved or clinically pretested drugs appeared especially attractive because that strategy promised fast initiation of antiviral clinical studies. On page 541 of this issue, the study by Tummino et al. (1) raises concerns that many drug candidates that showed antiviral activity in hypothesis-free cellular screens and were then repurposed to treat severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infections may be scientific dead ends. Their study is a warning that even amid the pressure of a pandemic, scientific diligence is still essential.

    Early in the pandemic, an international team of scientists undertook a comprehensive study to identify human proteins that interact with proteins from SARS-CoV-2 (2). The idea was that if one or more of these human proteins were required for viral production, then there may be drugs that target them “on the shelf” that could be repurposed to treat COVID-19 patients. The team identified several candidate drug targets, among which were the sigma receptors. They went on to show that drugs targeting these receptors potently inhibited viral production in cell culture, providing preliminary “validation” of sigma receptors as COVID-19 drug targets.

    However, as members of the same team began to investigate their potential for clinical studies, they became concerned. In testing 50 different sigma receptor drugs to find the most suitable one, they found no correlation between the potency with which the drugs inhibited the receptor and their antiviral activity. What was going on? Tummino et al. show that the antiviral activity in cell-culture assays had nothing to do with modulation of the sigma receptors but rather correlated with certain chemical properties of the compounds. The subset of drugs that had antiviral activity were all cationic and amphiphilic, features known to induce phospholipidosis (3), which is an aberrant accumulation of phospholipids in the lysosome. Potent sigma receptor drugs that did not induce phospholipidosis showed no antiviral activity. Drug-induced phospholipidosis is a side effect of cationic amphiphilic drugs (CADs), and these drugs are known to inhibit the production of many other viruses in cell culture.

    […]

    (Emphasis added.)

    tl;dr – Human bodies are complicated. Antiviral properties in culture might not indicate anything meaningful for treatment of disease. It’s important to understand mechanisms when developing treatments. Experts know what they’re doing, and RWNJ amateurs are not a source of good medical advice.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  76. 76.

    Baud

    @Another Scott:

    Tummino et al. show that the antiviral activity in cell-culture assays had nothing to do with modulation of the sigma receptors but rather correlated with certain chemical properties of the compounds.

     
    Fuck.

  78. 78.

    Another Scott

    @Baud: Eh?

    I took that as good news.  It’s better to figure these things out early – before wasting time on fruitless (and potentially dangerous for the participants) clinical trials.

    [eta:] And it’s another weapon against the “I saw on OANN that plutonium hexaflouride kills the ‘rona in culture so I’m going down to Bubba’s USSR Surplus to get me some.  Wanna come along??!” nonsense.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  79. 79.

    Dan B

    @Betty: There is growing pushback against DeathSantis, excuse my rude words, in school districts, even Broward County which had said it would not enforce mask mandates.  Plummeting poll numbers for Governor Death might be one contributor as well as legal opinions.

  81. 81.

    mrmoshpotato

    Question: Could you ever get behind a vaccine mandate for everybody? Ron Johnson: No, not unless there’s some incredibly deadly disease

    Greetings to our neighbors to the north!

    We gave our Rethuglican Senator the boot in 2016. It can be done.

    You could even boot him into Lake Superior and not try for the 93 million mile field goal.

  82. 82.

    Jeffro

    @rikyrah: “smell that?  it’s subpoenas…I love the smell of subpoenas in the morning”

    BRING IT, DEMS

    haul ALL their asses in to testify about this ‘cooperation’ with the trumpov White House

  85. 85.

    RSA

    @Another Scott: Cool. Thanks for the excerpt—it’s a nice capsule summary of balancing exploration (hypothesis-free can be good!) with modeling and confirmation (understanding the mechanisms, ideally).

  86. 86.

    mrmoshpotato

    @NotMax:

    Definition of disposition

    1a: prevailing tendency, mood, or inclination
    b: temperamental makeup
    c: the tendency of something to act in a certain manner under given circumstances

    The cow got sloshed and thought it could jump over the Moon.

    Or maybe the whiskey realized what a dick Pompeo is and ran away with the dish and the spoon.

  87. 87.

    RSA

    @rikyrah:

    Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) tweeted at 3:04 PM on Wed, Aug 04, 2021:
    A group of media organizations have filed a motion to release the identities of the jury in the Chauvin prosecution. t.co/JsYYD2kkjN

    Wow. Those news organizations include a cross-section of mainstream media, including WP, NTY, and WSJ.  IANAL, but even if their arguments are well-grounded in the law, I think that they are on shaky moral ground.

    For example, they mention harassment as if it’s a minor concern, also observing that there are laws against harassment.  I’m sure the Sandy Hook parents, for example, find that comforting.  ETA: With harassers like Alex Jones still walking around, while some of those parents have had to move multiple times to escape.

    They also argue that there is no strong reason to believe Chauvin jurors have reason to fear for their safety, in contrast to someone who might have been a juror in a gang trial. Given the ambivalence of the Minnesota police union in cases like this, shouldn’t they also ask whether Chauvin jurors can expect unbiased treatment from the police?

    Ugh, what a stupid, stupid motion.

  89. 89.

    Roger Moore

    @Another Scott:

    No doubt they secretly wear suits of wool and linen, and don’t have tassels at the four corners of their cloaks.

    I have to admit, I would be very understanding if I found out they didn’t honor their father.

  92. 92.

    J R in WV

    @Just Chuck: ​
     

    @sab: Did he have an account at the bank? It’s SOP for them to fingerprint if that’s not the case.

    The last time this honky was fingerprinted was in 1970 when I was forcibly enlisted into the US Navy. There is NO SOP to fingerprint people conducting a normal financial transaction!

    This is racist nonsense and anyone doing business like this should be fired for their racist bullshit!!

    And the realtor getting held at gunpoint in Michigan, those cops should all be fired ASAP for their racist bullshit !!!

  93. 93.

    There are those who call me...tim... (Still posh)

    If we didn’t have all the medicine ‘n stuff, this would blow over in no time. Goddamn all that medicine!

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