Category: News & Comment

Who’s Groomin’ Who? Here’s a List of Recent Top Republican Groomers, Including GOP Former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert

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Former Speaker Dennis Hastert

It has become a hard and fast rule in 21st century American politics that when Republicans accuse Democrats of criminal, salacious or corrupt behavior, it’s a “tell” that they are engaged in the same behavior – and then some.

It’s called “projecting,” and Republicans have been doing it for years. According to Psychology Today, “Projection is a defense mechanism commonly used by abusers, including people with narcissistic or borderline personality disorder and addicts.” It is no surprise then that Republicans’ projection strategy was perfected during the regime of Donald Trump, the ultimate toxic narcissist.

Like psychological projection, political projection attributes the accusers’ worst impulses onto their opponents. Case in point, Republicans have recently begun parroting their small but apparently influential Qanon base by accusing Democrats of grooming children for sex. The political aim behind these smears is to scare suburban moms who voted for Obama and then Trump and then Biden to vote for GQP candidates this November and in 2024.

In spreading their lies about grooming, however, Republicans are projecting one of their most glaring character flaws onto Democrats. The unpleasant fact that they’re trying to deflects is that they are the party of rampant pedophilia. Republicans believe they can get away with this scam because they know right-wing propaganda outlets like Fox will never mention their party leaders’ record of child sex abuse – and they can count on the trusty lamestream media to ignore it. That means its up to the rest of us to get the word out.

The following list of Republican sex abusers could be a start. It includes a Republican former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, a Republican former U.S. senator and governor of South Carolina, a Republican former congressman, a Trump campaign state chairman, Republican state legislators, a Republican judge, Republican mayors, Republican fundraisers, Republican political activists, Republican preachers and right-wing radio propagandists.

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Dear Republicans: What Entitles You to the Right to Call Yourselves ‘Patriots?’

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Trump enablers

Bruce Lindner:

Dear Republicans:

You didn’t object when you heard Donald Trump say he likes to grab women “by the pussy.”

You didn’t object when he kicked the American media out of the Oval Office and handed two Russian spies classified data entrusted to him by one of our allies.

You didn’t object when he likened our intelligence community to “Nazis.”

You didn’t object when he stood before the Memorial Wall of Stars at Langley and told lie after lie about himself and the election.

You didn’t object while at the Helsinki Summit, he met behind closed doors with the Russian President.

You didn’t object to him banning the American Press from covering that meeting.

You didn’t object when he emerged from that meeting and sided with the Russian President over the findings of our own intelligence community.

You didn’t object when the Trump campaign admitted to accepting Russian offers to help him defeat Secretary of State Clinton.

[…]

Reagan’s ‘Trickle Down’ Tax-Cuts-for-the-Wealthy Policy Is Still Ruining the Economy – in 5 Charts

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It wasn’t a “trickle,” it was a gusher, and the money went up to the wealthy, not down to the middle and working classes.

George H.W. Bush called it “Voodoo Economics” when he was running against Reagan in 1980 – before he drank the Kool-Aid and became Reagan’s vice president. Well, they’re still doing that voodoo they do. Trump, McConnell and company passed yet another tax cut for their wealthy donors and corporate sponsors in 2017. And they’ll do it again if the control the White and the Congress after 2024. Count on it.

Reagan's "trickle down" economics policy is still ruining the economy

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It’s the Economy’s Great, Stupid!

Buck Banks


An estimated 166,000 Americans filed initial unemployment claims last week, down nearly 5,000 claims from the previous week and better than analyst projections of 200,000. It is the lowest figure since November 1968 (and the second-lowest since weekly reporting began in January 1967). Continuing claims rose slightly by 17,000 to 1.52 million, coming two years after the number of claims reached an all-time high of 6.1 million in April 2020.

The decline shows employers are limiting layoffs in a tight labor market. Roughly 1.8 job openings are available for every unemployed worker; the unemployment rate stood at 3.6% in March, just above the prepandemic level of 3.5%. Nearly 4.4 million workers left their jobs in February, a number that has held steady as employers try to fill job openings.

The figure represents the third consecutive week that new claims fell below 200,000.

Republicans Are Just Projecting Their Party’s Proven Pedophilia Onto Opponents

Buck Banks

The Daily Beast has an interesting article on the recent trend of Republicans calling anyone who disagrees with them a “pedo” or “groomer,” implying that if you disagree on policy it’s because you’re a pervert. Well, it takes on to know one, as they say, and according to the Beast, there’s lots of pedos and groomers in the GOP closet.

The list is not long, but it’s undeniable: Dennis Hastert, Mark Foley, Judge Roy Moore and Rep. Jim Jordan’s failure to report abuse when he was a wrestling coach at Ohio State University.

Maybe Republicans know something we don’t, have something up their sleeve we can’t see, or have nothing else to say. It was clear that the party had dispensed with any coherent ideology on which to run when they declined to even put forward a platform in 2016.

Meanwhile Rep. Marjoie Taylor Greene—notorious before she even took office for her QAnon sympathies—is screaming that anyone who votes for the confirmation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is “pro-pedophile,” including three Republicans.

Republicans are projecting so loudly, no one can hear anything else they’re saying. They’re widely expected to win big in the midterm elections, but if they stick with this crackpot strategy, they’re going to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Have at it.

DeSantis’ ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Law Foundation Story Found to Be a Lie

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If only facts mattered.

CNN: “Facts First: DeSantis’ account of what happened in Leon County is not quite what a limited number of records that have been made public show, and the governor has continued to repeat the story even after those records were made public late last year. CNN obtained emails that show Littlejohn wrote the school in 2020 and notified a teacher that her child wanted to change pronouns. Contrary to the governor’s portrayal of the story, Littlejohn also wrote that she would not stop her child from using preferred pronouns or name of choice at school. Littlejohn references these emails in her lawsuit against the school and they were reported by the Tallahassee Democrat in November.”

Found: U.S. Government’s Fake Newscast for 1986 Nuclear Training Session

Buck Banks


Gizmodo has uncovered a fake news broadcast created for Mighty Derringer, a large-scale Department of Energy nuclear terrorism training session held in Indianapolis in 1986. It’s pretty good and, yes, pretty scary.

In December of 1986, the Pentagon, the CIA, FBI, the Department of Energy, and just about every other federal agency you can think of came together in Indianapolis for an enormous training exercise code-named Mighty Derringer. The plan was to simulate a nuclear terrorist incident and explore how every agency would react and whether they would cooperate. To enhance the verisimilitude of the war games, the U.S. government went so far as to record a fake news broadcast about a nuclear bomb exploding in Indianapolis.

Watch it here.

New Website Collects MAGA-GOPers’ Praise of Putin

Pensito Editors


I know it is tiresome, listening to Comrade Tucker Carlson and his ilk suggesting that we choose Russia over Ukraine, Putin over Zelkenskyy. But for your convenience, the Republican Accountability Project collects them as they are uttered and preserves them for all to read.

Here’s how they describe what they do:

Only 5 percent of Republicans support Russia over Ukraine, but the MAGA wing of the GOP has continually sided with Putin and against Ukraine.

Current and former elected officials, candidates for office, and media figures who are popular with the MAGA base have a history of pro-Russia comments. Now, they have decided that they should disparage Ukraine and Volodymyr Zelenskyy despite Russia’s invasion. Some of them have walked back their comments once they saw Putin’s war machine target innocent people, but many still see Russia as an ally.

We’ve collected their quotes below to make sure they can never forget where they stood.