Sunday Tab Clearing
So many intentions to write, so little time.

- A column by Will Bunch from the Philadelphia Inquirer does s great job of running down a host of things you are all likely familiar with, but makes for a powerful list together: Voters don’t have a clue about how much worse Trump’s second term would be.
- Via The Daily Beast: Stormy Daniels’ Description of Sex With Trump Is All Too Familiar for Sex Workers.
- Via the Salt Lake Tribune: ‘We are losing our kids to a satanic cult,’ Sen. Tommy Tuberville warns during Utah campaign stop. Worth a click just for the photo.
- Via CNN: NBC hires former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, who has demonized the press and refused to acknowledge Biden was fairly elected.
“It couldn’t be a more important moment to have a voice like Ronna’s on the team,” Carrie Budoff Brown, senior vice president of politics at NBC News, said in a memo to staff.
I have to confess, I don’t see the upside of having an election denier on the team. This is just one of the more cancerous manifestations of both-siderism that also helps legitimize misinformation and normalize Trumpism.
- Good stuff:
- Via AL.com: Secretary of State Wes Allen says Alabama’s new absentee voting law in effect for November election.
“Ballot harvesting is a big term, obviously,” Allen said. “And our opponents always point to us, ‘Show us the prosecutions.’ Well, there was few prosecutions because it was so vague and there was no penalties. So, DAs and the AG, they’re just not going to focus on that particular code section on ballot harvesting.
“But we know it goes on. We receive calls. We know it happens out there. There are instances where there are paid political operatives, paid ballot traffickers, or whatever you want to call them, that go and put influence on the absentee process, going out and gathering up these applications and trying to influence the absentee process.”
I must confess that, “we receive calls” is not exactly compelling evidence of much of anything.
- Via the Texas Tribune: They counted primary ballots by hand. Now a Texas county Republican party says they found errors.
“We took something that worked and now broke it,” Netherland said. “We failed to guard the purity of the election with this hand count. What we just did is evidence that this hand count was not accurate.
[…]
Morrell added that the discrepancies found in Gillespie and in Travis don’t typically occur in elections where voting equipment is used. Even in parts of the process where hand counting is used, such as audits or recounts (where only one or two races are counted rather than the entire ballot), “we find that it’s easy for people to make mistakes,” she said. And that’s especially true when tallying undervotes.
Who could have known?
This, especially given her role appears to have gone far past simply just giving denial. At least in Michigan it appears McDaniel played an active role in attempts to not verify election results.
https://abc7chicago.com/donald-trump-michigan-election-officials-phone-call/14215970/
If he talks about Satanic cults that should really help Kari Lake’s pivoting to being seen as more moderate.
Now, to be scrupulously fair to Sen. Potatotown, I know at least one trans woman that’s an actual Satanist. Boringly, the majority are standard issue Abrahamic monotheists. The rest of us are either mainstream polytheists or worship a melange of mostly femme coded dieties. Lots of Athena worship.
Personally, I tend toward the night coded femme dieties. You know, Nyx, Hecate, the Fates. Lots of moon worship right here. lol, I bet I could make Tommy crap his pants with that. I mean what’s worse than Satan besides Women.
@Beth:
I laughed out loud at your very last line.
@Beth:
This enby is a Discordian. Christian Nationalists suffer from the Curse of Greyface.
I’m glad Senator Tuberville is worried about the Republican party losing kids to Katie Britt’s Satanic cult.
@Steven L. Taylor
Did you even encounter Wes Allen when he worked in Troy University’s athletic dept? The fact that this guy is Secretary of State of any state is an embarrassing.
Hoo boy.
Indiana is #1!
Link goes to text of a bill allowing universities in Indiana to revoke tenure if the prof doesn’t sufficiently promote Intellectual Diversity.
Sufficient content of that diversity, of course, will only be determined by the nearest Drunk Young Republican.
@Steven L. Taylor
Did you ever encounter Wes Allen when he worked in the Troy University athletic dept? Surely you felt his aura of power and ambition radiate across campus? That this guy holds any form of public office is an indictment of our political system. Not that this only applies to him of course.
@LMNOP: I recall his stint as Probate Judge in Pike County, but I did not have any direct encounters. I am not sure I was aware that he worked at the university.