Thursday Open Thread

14
  by: Colorado Pols January 5, 2023 at 7:23 AM MST

“A fault is fostered by concealment.”

–Virgil

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  1. Lauren Boebert is a Worthless POS says:
    January 5, 2023 at 7:41 AM MST

    DayThree. America Held Hostage.

    Cue the music from Nightline and bring in Ted Koppel.

  2. JohnInDenver says:
    January 5, 2023 at 7:55 AM MST

    Outsider's opinion on Rep. Lauren "Bim" Boebert:

    Jeers for gun-totin’ boebart. I have managed to avoid having to listen to her all this time. Well, the magic is gone after her speech(?) yesterday. It was painful. I won’t say she is stupid, I try not to say such things, but mon dieu! she is challenged. The burning question is wondering who they will put out there today to confirm what we all can see. The stupid, it burns.

    • Duke Cox says:
      January 5, 2023 at 8:21 AM MST

      My first real experience in politics ( I don’t count high school student council, though learning Roberts Rules of Order was valuable) was as a student senator at a jr. college in Fla. 

      The leadership of the student senate were experienced and organized. I naively trusted them, so I did not understand when they used me to deliver a statement to the Board of Trustees which was extremely stupid and immediately made me a pariah to the faculty and most students.

      Calling the OD her “favorite president” won’t save her from the consequences of her betrayal. She may have calculated that he is done, and she can get away with crossing His Magnificent Meanness. History suggests otherwise…

      • The realist says:
        January 5, 2023 at 9:06 AM MST

        Boebert no doubt does not understand the "nuance" – that Trump can be done as President but not done as a mean, vengeful, calculating influencer of millions of MAGAts. She also does not understand that winning by 500-some votes out of 327 thousand is not a mandate – from anyone.

      • MichaelBowman says:
        January 5, 2023 at 11:53 AM MST

        Speaking as a creature of the FFA program, learning (and practicing) Roberts Rules of Order was an invaluable life skill that has served me well.

  3. ParkHill says:
    January 5, 2023 at 7:56 AM MST

    Heather Cox-Richardson is really great today. (Sorry to post such a long comment.)

    But there is a larger story here about the destruction of the traditional Republican Party over the past forty years. In those years, a party that believed the government had a role to play in leveling the country’s economic and racial playing fields was captured by a reactionary right wing determined to uproot any such government action. When voters—including Republicans—continued to support business regulation, a basic social safety net, and civil rights laws, the logical outcome of opposition to such measures was war on the government itself. 

    That war is not limited to the 20 far-right Republicans refusing to elect McCarthy speaker. Pundits note that those 20 have supported former president Trump’s positions, particularly the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen. They also worked to overturn the 2020 election, challenging the electors from a number of states. But 139 Republicans, including McCarthy himself, voted in 2021 to challenge electors from a number of states and went on to embrace the Big Lie, and McCarthy’s staunchest supporter is extremist Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

    And today, more than 60 prominent right-wing figures, from President Ronald Reagan’s attorney general Edwin Meese III to Trump lawyers Cleta Mitchell and John Eastman, who were both instrumental in the effort to overturn Biden’s election in 2020, and Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife Ginni Thomas, who also participated in that effort, declared themselves “disgusted with the business-as-usual, self-interested governance in Washington.” They declared their support for the 20. 

    The roots of today’s Republican worldview lie in the Reagan Revolution of 1980. 

    Reagan and his allies sought to dismantle the regulation of business and the social welfare state that cost tax dollars, but they recognized those policies were popular. So they fell back on an old Reconstruction era trope, arguing that social welfare programs and regulation were a form of socialism because they cost tax dollars that were paid primarily by white men while their benefits went to poor Americans, primarily Black people or people of color. In that formula, first articulated by former Confederates after the Civil War, minority voting was a form of socialism that would destroy America. 

  4. ParkHill says:
    January 5, 2023 at 10:02 AM MST

    Not my Clown Show; Not my Rodeo.

    I think that the democratic Representatives should show up wearing clown noses and cowboy hats. They could do a conga line as they march through the missing metal detectors.

    Ridicule is good medicine, and it would gain attention. "We're only dressing up like clowns."

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