NC Republicans: Sexual harassment is fine, but not disloyalty to Emperor Trump

My state Republican Party has censured Sen. Richard Burr for his pro-impeachment vote? But multiply accused sexual predator, NC Rep. and Trump toady Madison Cawthorn? Him they’re fine with. No surprise, just look at all the right-wingers who defended Brett Kavanaugh. Cawthorn claims that It’s All Political, he’s also been accused by fellow students from Patrick Henry College, which is ultra-conservative. As Fred Clark details it’s not a typical Christian college. This Twitter thread provides more detail.

Andrew Cuomo’s accusers now number three. Nothing of a Harvey Weinstein/Trump/Cawthorn level, but Monica Hesse argues that’s still a problem: “The point is that this scandal, more than anything, exemplifies the calculus that a typical female employee encounters every day in casual workplace sexism — the tiring, unsettling, nagging, self-doubting calculus: Is this wrong? Or am I wrong?” Regardless, I’m pleased Democrats and cracking down instead of ducking the issue. And if you’re curious about Cuomo’s nursing-home-and-COVID scandal, click here.

Richard Barnett, the Sedition Day Republican rioter who put his feet up on Pelosi’s desk, is shocked and appalled that he’s not been released on his own bond. A lot of the rioters were cocky like that. And the FBI just arrested a Trump appointee as one of the seditionists.

How the right spread the lie that the Sedition Day riot was antifa. I suspect people’s willingness to believe It Wasn’t Us counts a lot too. Or there’s lying pus-bag Tucker Carlson, who dismissed the plot to kidnap the Michigan governor as the work of “right-wing vagrants.” Which would be trivial but I’ve seen several Trumpites on FB complaining we shouldn’t make a fuss about the sedition day plotters because they were incompetent. And Hawley and Cruz seem concerned about investigations targeting anyone higher up.

Dr. Jill Biden’s coffee habits.

The Trump Virus has been bad, but this year’s flu-season has been a non-event.

How QAnon went mainstream. Oh, and now that Trump obviously didn’t get installed as president last Thursday, that crackpot theory is suddenly a government psy-ops operation (at the link, Paul Campos accurately describes the root beliefs as “the kind of magical thinking that gloms onto ordinary legal texts and interprets them like Cabalists on meth.”) Republicans however, have made it politically correct in their party to pretend Trump won (“The enemies of freedom are employing their most sinister weapon: facts and reason!”).

The decision by various states to open up completely is more horrifying because we’re so damn close to being able to do it safety. But here’s some brilliant thinking by Arizona State Rep. Joseph Chaplik: Mask mandates are dumb because we survived AIDS without them. AIDS is not, of course, spread by breathing … But Texas Governor Glenn Abbott is out to ban tech companies from blocking people because of their politics (that Trump was banned for lying and stirring up an insurrection will go unstated). And then there’s his management of the power grid …

Right-winger Josh Bernstein thinks it should be tougher for people to vote. Much tougher. But then, the entire Republican Party is now anti-democracy. One Republican attorney says the party is at a competitive disadvantage without voting restrictions, as if that justified them (and I’m sure for him it does). And even when we win, they think we should lose: Moscow Mitch is working with the Republican-dominated Ky. State Legislature to change the law so that the Democratic governor won’t pick Mitch’s replacement. And Marjorie Taylor Greene claims metal detectors in Congress are the real voter suppression.

Sen. Mitt Romney proposes a new welfare plan. Right-winger Oren Cass decides this is a terrible idea because it won’t fix the root causes of poverty. As noted at the link and here, police don’t solve the root causes of crime and medicine hasn’t solved the root causes of disease, but right-wingers like Cass are fine with that.