16 thoughts on “Tuesday Open Thread”

1. today is National Nitrogen Ice Cream Day

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   1. davebarnes, if you really are a “webmaster” on Pols, would you please focus on getting rid of all the spam diaries and make it impossible to create one?

      That would be a lot more useful than your inane “today is_______” comments.

      Thank you.

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      1. Webmaster???? . . .

         Hmmh? And here I always thought that HE was one of those spammers that couldn’t be gotten rid of? . . .

         Is there a difference?

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2. My Yahoo Newsfeed today reports that attorney Jenna Ellis has left the Republican party in anger that an e-mail from a senior attorney in the RNC, that criticized the effort to overturn the election, calling it a joke, had been revealed. My thought is simple: good riddance to bad rubbish.

   Jenna has other problems. In the July 12 issue of National Review, in an article on the Southern Baptist Convention (“Our Lord Isn’t Woke”), author Kevin D. Williamson refers to Ellis as a “grotesque huckster, one of the crackpot lawyers involved in the failed effort to help Donald Trump overturn the 2020 presidential election.” 

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   1. Jenna Ellis has some interesting thoughts: DKOS letter pulling from a Raw Story post.

      "What happened to the millions raised by the RNC in November and December of 2020 — the Trump team never saw a dime of that help," she argued. "All of them, including Ronna McDaniel, should resign now. Until they do, as of today, I am resigning from the party… A compromised, corrupted majority is not a majority worth being a part of."

      No word on the value of a compromised, corrupted minority, either.

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      1. Newsflash — No Honor Among Grifters ???

         . . . Gobsmacked, not.

         (PS to Jenna — Wake up dear, if they’d had funds for, and been able to find any for-reals legal team willing to take those nonsense cases, you’d have never gotten hired on in the first place.)

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         1. You get what you pay for. Sometimes even less.

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3. Things aren't going so well for former Colorado GOP chair Ryan Call either.  Interestingly, there is a Paul Manafort connection.

   The allegations against Ryan Call, who served two terms as chair of the Colorado GOP between 2011 and 2015, were first disclosed in a disciplinary complaint filed against him last month by the Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel. The complaint alleges that between 2016 and 2019, Call “knowingly misappropriated” $278,169.45 in funds from Rebuilding America Now, a super PAC established to support former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.

   His former law partner reported him:

   “These circumstances are very rare, in my experience,” Hale, who has practiced law in Colorado for more than 30 years, told Newsline in an interview. “The Office of Attorney Regulation (Counsel) is very capable of doing the investigation, and so that’s why — that’s what our job is, to turn it over to them. We’ve taken the steps that we thought were necessary to make the referral, and fire Ryan.”

   Almost a den of thieves:

   Brendan Fischer, director of federal reform for the Campaign Legal Center, a campaign-finance watchdog group, told Newsline in an interview last month that there was “all sorts of shady stuff happening” with RAN during and after the 2016 election. The Campaign Legal Center filed an FEC complaint of its own against the group in 2016, and Fischer wrote about the group’s “dubious legal maneuvers” in 2019 after it was reported that RAN had come under scrutiny in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of foreign interference in the 2016 election.

   Several longtime allies of Trump 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort occupied key positions at RAN, including its managing director, Laurance “Laury” Gay, a Connecticut lobbyist who formerly worked for Manafort and is godfather to one of his daughters, according to CNBC. In 2018, Manafort was convicted on eight counts of tax fraud and other charges in connection with Mueller’s investigation, serving time in prison before Trump pardoned him in December 2020.

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   1. That one saddens me. I thought Call was a decent guy and ran the state party pretty well given the headwinds and hoodlums he endured during his tenure. 

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      1. Didn't Call institute the $100k salary for the Colorado GOP chair position?  I assume he wasn't independently wealthy, and figured signing his own paychecks at RAN was the least of their sins.

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         1. That could have been. I don’t remember those details, only that he exhibited some hesitation to drink the kkkool-aid when the kkkrazy train rolled into the station. 

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      2. Well, you gotta' admit, he was no Steve House . . .

         . . . just ask Fluffy.

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4. Why does this map only favor 7 Democratic seats?  Because they couldn't make it 8 🙂

   

   Thomas Mowle, a Colorado Sun reader, sent us the congressional map he drew, which would give Democrats a partisan-lean advantage in seven of Colorado’s eight congressional districts.

   Mowle, who owns Rampart Professional Solutions, wants to be clear: He’s not advocating for the map to be adopted. He drew it as an example of what an “obnoxiously gerrymandered map” could be.

   Under the map, Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District would be on the only Republican-leaning congressional district in the state, wrapping from the Western Slope through extreme northern Colorado and then across the Eastern Plains and into parts of El Paso County. All of the Republican strongholds would effectively be lumped together.

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   1. Ah, what might have been…..

      It would have set up a primary between Ken Buck and Q-bert, eliminated one of their seats, and gotten rid of Still-born at the same time.

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   2. Smells like Texas!

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      1. What is your point?

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