Love you Charlie, but I gotta defend myself and my colleagues in the Nassau Dems and those in the Zimmerman campaign. We did oppo research. We found shady stuff with his finances, enough that should have warranted much more media scrutiny. The large newspapers like the NYT utterly failed in this before the election, but Long Islands local paper, Newsday, did cover what we democrats we talking about in terms of Santos’s record and credibility. I know for a fact that the Zimmerman campaign gave their oppo research to the NYT several times throughout the campaign, but they just sat on the story until after the election! We Nassau Dems have had a rough few years, but damnit we worked as hard as we possibly could. The media hype over crime and bail reform + defund the police + 2020 riots blared out our own messaging on santos record. For 2 years in a row it’s killed us. But back to the Santos story, this is first and foremost a failure of the media, and of the Nassau GOP for their unreal lack of standards in terms of who they run for public office. Keep the fire on them, we got enough to deal with as it is trying to keep the pressure on Santos, the media, and the pathetic Nassau GOP!
As a public librarian whose responsibility covers buying all adult fiction and non-fiction books for the library, I can tell you these have been the hardest years of my career. I do my level best to keep things ideologically neutral as possible and keep my leftist bias out of it -- and I do think many of my colleagues have a left leaning bias. For example, in my large regional consortium, our library is the only one that has Richard Reeves' new book, "Of Boys and Men: Why the modern male is struggling, why it matters, and what to do about it." There is currently 10 holds in the system for the one copy -- it's insane that I am the only library who has it in the system -- it's an important book that makes cogent arguments. I bought Pence's new book. I bought Tom Cotton's new book. I bought the new bio on Limbaugh that borders on hagiography. I buy more books on religion, prayer, Christianity etc. than any other library in our consortium.
The only thing I will not buy, no matter how many public requests for it I get, are books that are devoid of facts. I will not buy books that "prove" the 2020 election was stolen, any more than I would buy books that "prove" the Earth is flat.
What baffles me is the lack of detail and focus on these questions: Why did George Santos lie? Who is George Santos really? What is his purpose here? If the education and job history and cultural experiences he claimed are all false, then what is true -- beyond what he didn't do, what did he do? Where did the money to bankroll his campaign come from? Who is behind the man? It's not enough to expose his lies. I wonder much more about the motivation behind it. Who benefits from placing George Santos in the House?
Very troublesome that Santos received so much funding from Russian connected source and has not accounted for how he could lend his campaign $700K despite the fact that he owes $12k in past rent and lives with his sister. I view this guy as a genuine SECURITY THREAT.
It’s scandalous that McCarthy refuses to address but I guess that’s par for the course.
"Anyone willing to set aside their qualms about Trump for the sake of holding executive power logically should be willing to set aside their qualms about Santos for the sake of holding legislative power."
This is the heart of the problem. It's not that Santos lied, it's that the party he represents doesn't care that they're being lied to, they just care about maintaining power and using that power to punish liberals. As long as the GOP politicians get to maintain power and punish liberals in any shape or form they can, the bootlicker MAGA base will throw their votes at these people constantly with little to no shame whatsoever. The Bootlicker Base hates liberals so much that they will lick 1000 pairs of a GOP politician's shoes just to get one single moment of joy when that politician does something nasty that the liberals won't like.
That's the entire relationship between the GOP's voters and its political class: indifference to a great many injustices against the working/middle class base by the wealthy conservative political class, just so long as the wealthy conservative political class are punishing liberals and throwing red meat to the base on occasion. It's tax cuts for the rich in exchange for punishing the LGBTQ+ community and/or banishing national secularism. So long as the GOP politicians play their part, the Bootlicker Base will play theirs. This is just a continuation of a long marriage between the conservative rich and working/middle classes that began during Nixon/LBJ, really ramped up under Reagan, and has finally come out of the closet unashamed of itself under Trump. They never really said the quiet part out loud until now because Trump helped them lose their shame.
Coincidentally, one of the things on my gratitude list this morning was the public library. What would I be without it? I can't even imagine. I spent as much time in the library as I could as a child. Having access to a warm hangout with lots of books you could read for free and super nice children's librarians who complimented me for reading instead of hounding me to do something else? Nirvana. No place ever felt as safe. I wanted to become a librarian but I never lived near a college that offered the professional degree and couldn't scrape up the money to live somewhere else and pay for a Masters. Especially considering how much librarians are paid, not getting the degree was probably the sensible economic decision. But I will never forget how the welcoming atmosphere of the library turned me into who I am today. I have no idea how anyone could get out of poverty without any kind of education.
I like to say that the only response to bad ideas in a book is to read a bunch of different books to cancel it out. Read like 6 books on a subject and then make up your own mind. Like, maybe I shouldn't have read Hunter S. Thompson and Stephen King in elementary school, but I didn't grow up to do drugs and murder people. Those were only a small percentage of what I read. But I'm about giving up on expecting people to read books. It's a shame. My kids say they have no focus or attention span. Reading is the cure, but they won't take it.
All book banners need to be dealt with. We lose a critical piece of our liberal foundations by engaging in selective book bans. All language, all writing, speech and communications need to be protected unless they meet the very high bars that have been in place for decades for hate and defamatory impacts. We risk generations of stunted adults who are limited as children and adolescents from the absolute free exchange of ideas.
The book banning is completely unacceptable. I’m a liberal Democrat, and I know progressives are nuts, and they aren’t Democrats. The Outrage Olympics are exhausting, and Chase Strangio has NO business being at the ACLU until he understands the difference between his personal life and the mission of a civil rights organization.
The progressive agenda re: classic books is embarrassing. The inveighing against JK Rowling is embarrassing. The idea that words are weapons is embarrassing. That corporations and universities give into this crap is beyond embarrassing.
I had a Marxist law professor who lived on mung beans and never bathed. He taught us many strange and politically explosive theories and challenged us daily on every capitalist idea we had, often rudely. Every class was disturbing and, I at least, walked home feeling stupid.
Because it was the early ‘80s, it would never have occurred to us to ask that he be disciplined or fired, nor would he have been. It wasn’t until I graduated that I watched enough TV to learn that he is an international law expert and a frequent national interview on Iran.
Republicans, however, are dangerous. They’re not misguidedly trying to stand up for fringe or minority elements, they’re trying to erase them. If you don’t allow children to know that some groups of people exist, or you whitewash history, the goal is to ensure that those people/ideas remain forever sidelined or even eliminated.
Several years ago someone circulated a poll. Perhaps it was on Facebook. The single question was whether children should be taught Arabic numbers? The negative response was overwhelming. That’s how stupid our country is, and the GOP benefits the more it can further dumb it down.
So much to unpack on the George Santos story and so little space.
There's the lack of any real repentance or remorse. There's the lack of willingness to take responsibility for choices made and accept their consequences. There's the parsing of truth and wordplay that evades facts in favor of interpretation,. There's the whole integrity issue and how much it matters what you do when people aren't looking, not just when they are. There's the idiocy of thinking that nobody will check the stuff you put out there about yourself in the midst of a high-profile electoral campaign. There's the double standard of lies, deception, and fraud that the GOP now allows itself while demanding more and better of others. I could go on all day. So could you. So could anyone with a functioning brain and even a modicum of human decency.
So let's just call Santos what he is: the new poster child for modern American politics, especially in the MAGA GOP. It's all about the self and promoting one's own interests over the needs of all, to the point of blatantly and willingly violating the public trust. In mathematical terms: Santos > the rest of us. Or, if you prefer, Santos > the constituents who pay his salary, pension, and benefits. Either way it has become about the person rather than the people, to the point that a politician can skate on an offense so egregious it would get the rest of us fired if we tried it. Yet they go merrily on their way.
Where is the bottom of this cesspool? Is there anything left that would disqualify these parasites from public employment, at public expense? We need to know. It is our future more than theirs that is at stake.
As someone who is actually a Jew not "Jew-ish", I'm confused as to how Santos has conflated his "Jew-ishness". Did he eat a bowl of homemade chicken soup with matzo balls? So if I hang out with my Hispanic friends more and eat homemade posole with handmade tortillas, washed down with a shot of Tequila, will that make me "Hispanic-ish"? His logic is twisted as a pretzel. But that's what passes for a republican nowadays, lie, conflate and obfuscate.
If I lied about my educational or employment history on my job application and HR found out, I would be fired on the spot. That's the policy; it's quite straightforward. Yet another example of how congress members aren't expected to live by the same rules the rest of us are. Why should we live by the rules they want to impose on us?? Asking for approximately 170,000,000 friends.
Among the GOP, truth has lost all meaning. In case we had any doubts, Santos has proven that. After all, he never said he was Jewish, he said he is Jew-ish.
I am Irish. Everyone claims to be Ir-ish on St. Patrick’s Day. That is a joke that everyone is in on.
Claiming to be of Jewish descent and now claiming you are Jew-ish is not a joke. It is an outrage. And, it is a further outrage that more is not being done to push back on this so called “embellishment” by Santos.
There is a precisely zero percent chance that the GOP will punish Santos in any meaningful way, let alone kick him out of Congress, which is obviously what they should do. They care about power, nothing more.
Love you Charlie, but I gotta defend myself and my colleagues in the Nassau Dems and those in the Zimmerman campaign. We did oppo research. We found shady stuff with his finances, enough that should have warranted much more media scrutiny. The large newspapers like the NYT utterly failed in this before the election, but Long Islands local paper, Newsday, did cover what we democrats we talking about in terms of Santos’s record and credibility. I know for a fact that the Zimmerman campaign gave their oppo research to the NYT several times throughout the campaign, but they just sat on the story until after the election! We Nassau Dems have had a rough few years, but damnit we worked as hard as we possibly could. The media hype over crime and bail reform + defund the police + 2020 riots blared out our own messaging on santos record. For 2 years in a row it’s killed us. But back to the Santos story, this is first and foremost a failure of the media, and of the Nassau GOP for their unreal lack of standards in terms of who they run for public office. Keep the fire on them, we got enough to deal with as it is trying to keep the pressure on Santos, the media, and the pathetic Nassau GOP!
As a public librarian whose responsibility covers buying all adult fiction and non-fiction books for the library, I can tell you these have been the hardest years of my career. I do my level best to keep things ideologically neutral as possible and keep my leftist bias out of it -- and I do think many of my colleagues have a left leaning bias. For example, in my large regional consortium, our library is the only one that has Richard Reeves' new book, "Of Boys and Men: Why the modern male is struggling, why it matters, and what to do about it." There is currently 10 holds in the system for the one copy -- it's insane that I am the only library who has it in the system -- it's an important book that makes cogent arguments. I bought Pence's new book. I bought Tom Cotton's new book. I bought the new bio on Limbaugh that borders on hagiography. I buy more books on religion, prayer, Christianity etc. than any other library in our consortium.
The only thing I will not buy, no matter how many public requests for it I get, are books that are devoid of facts. I will not buy books that "prove" the 2020 election was stolen, any more than I would buy books that "prove" the Earth is flat.
What baffles me is the lack of detail and focus on these questions: Why did George Santos lie? Who is George Santos really? What is his purpose here? If the education and job history and cultural experiences he claimed are all false, then what is true -- beyond what he didn't do, what did he do? Where did the money to bankroll his campaign come from? Who is behind the man? It's not enough to expose his lies. I wonder much more about the motivation behind it. Who benefits from placing George Santos in the House?
Very troublesome that Santos received so much funding from Russian connected source and has not accounted for how he could lend his campaign $700K despite the fact that he owes $12k in past rent and lives with his sister. I view this guy as a genuine SECURITY THREAT.
It’s scandalous that McCarthy refuses to address but I guess that’s par for the course.
"Anyone willing to set aside their qualms about Trump for the sake of holding executive power logically should be willing to set aside their qualms about Santos for the sake of holding legislative power."
This is the heart of the problem. It's not that Santos lied, it's that the party he represents doesn't care that they're being lied to, they just care about maintaining power and using that power to punish liberals. As long as the GOP politicians get to maintain power and punish liberals in any shape or form they can, the bootlicker MAGA base will throw their votes at these people constantly with little to no shame whatsoever. The Bootlicker Base hates liberals so much that they will lick 1000 pairs of a GOP politician's shoes just to get one single moment of joy when that politician does something nasty that the liberals won't like.
That's the entire relationship between the GOP's voters and its political class: indifference to a great many injustices against the working/middle class base by the wealthy conservative political class, just so long as the wealthy conservative political class are punishing liberals and throwing red meat to the base on occasion. It's tax cuts for the rich in exchange for punishing the LGBTQ+ community and/or banishing national secularism. So long as the GOP politicians play their part, the Bootlicker Base will play theirs. This is just a continuation of a long marriage between the conservative rich and working/middle classes that began during Nixon/LBJ, really ramped up under Reagan, and has finally come out of the closet unashamed of itself under Trump. They never really said the quiet part out loud until now because Trump helped them lose their shame.
Coincidentally, one of the things on my gratitude list this morning was the public library. What would I be without it? I can't even imagine. I spent as much time in the library as I could as a child. Having access to a warm hangout with lots of books you could read for free and super nice children's librarians who complimented me for reading instead of hounding me to do something else? Nirvana. No place ever felt as safe. I wanted to become a librarian but I never lived near a college that offered the professional degree and couldn't scrape up the money to live somewhere else and pay for a Masters. Especially considering how much librarians are paid, not getting the degree was probably the sensible economic decision. But I will never forget how the welcoming atmosphere of the library turned me into who I am today. I have no idea how anyone could get out of poverty without any kind of education.
I like to say that the only response to bad ideas in a book is to read a bunch of different books to cancel it out. Read like 6 books on a subject and then make up your own mind. Like, maybe I shouldn't have read Hunter S. Thompson and Stephen King in elementary school, but I didn't grow up to do drugs and murder people. Those were only a small percentage of what I read. But I'm about giving up on expecting people to read books. It's a shame. My kids say they have no focus or attention span. Reading is the cure, but they won't take it.
All book banners need to be dealt with. We lose a critical piece of our liberal foundations by engaging in selective book bans. All language, all writing, speech and communications need to be protected unless they meet the very high bars that have been in place for decades for hate and defamatory impacts. We risk generations of stunted adults who are limited as children and adolescents from the absolute free exchange of ideas.
The book banning is completely unacceptable. I’m a liberal Democrat, and I know progressives are nuts, and they aren’t Democrats. The Outrage Olympics are exhausting, and Chase Strangio has NO business being at the ACLU until he understands the difference between his personal life and the mission of a civil rights organization.
The progressive agenda re: classic books is embarrassing. The inveighing against JK Rowling is embarrassing. The idea that words are weapons is embarrassing. That corporations and universities give into this crap is beyond embarrassing.
I had a Marxist law professor who lived on mung beans and never bathed. He taught us many strange and politically explosive theories and challenged us daily on every capitalist idea we had, often rudely. Every class was disturbing and, I at least, walked home feeling stupid.
Because it was the early ‘80s, it would never have occurred to us to ask that he be disciplined or fired, nor would he have been. It wasn’t until I graduated that I watched enough TV to learn that he is an international law expert and a frequent national interview on Iran.
Republicans, however, are dangerous. They’re not misguidedly trying to stand up for fringe or minority elements, they’re trying to erase them. If you don’t allow children to know that some groups of people exist, or you whitewash history, the goal is to ensure that those people/ideas remain forever sidelined or even eliminated.
Several years ago someone circulated a poll. Perhaps it was on Facebook. The single question was whether children should be taught Arabic numbers? The negative response was overwhelming. That’s how stupid our country is, and the GOP benefits the more it can further dumb it down.
So much to unpack on the George Santos story and so little space.
There's the lack of any real repentance or remorse. There's the lack of willingness to take responsibility for choices made and accept their consequences. There's the parsing of truth and wordplay that evades facts in favor of interpretation,. There's the whole integrity issue and how much it matters what you do when people aren't looking, not just when they are. There's the idiocy of thinking that nobody will check the stuff you put out there about yourself in the midst of a high-profile electoral campaign. There's the double standard of lies, deception, and fraud that the GOP now allows itself while demanding more and better of others. I could go on all day. So could you. So could anyone with a functioning brain and even a modicum of human decency.
So let's just call Santos what he is: the new poster child for modern American politics, especially in the MAGA GOP. It's all about the self and promoting one's own interests over the needs of all, to the point of blatantly and willingly violating the public trust. In mathematical terms: Santos > the rest of us. Or, if you prefer, Santos > the constituents who pay his salary, pension, and benefits. Either way it has become about the person rather than the people, to the point that a politician can skate on an offense so egregious it would get the rest of us fired if we tried it. Yet they go merrily on their way.
Where is the bottom of this cesspool? Is there anything left that would disqualify these parasites from public employment, at public expense? We need to know. It is our future more than theirs that is at stake.
They’ll treat this “dilemma” as they do all the others. Deny, deflect and move on. Until we vote them out, it will be same old, same old.
As someone who is actually a Jew not "Jew-ish", I'm confused as to how Santos has conflated his "Jew-ishness". Did he eat a bowl of homemade chicken soup with matzo balls? So if I hang out with my Hispanic friends more and eat homemade posole with handmade tortillas, washed down with a shot of Tequila, will that make me "Hispanic-ish"? His logic is twisted as a pretzel. But that's what passes for a republican nowadays, lie, conflate and obfuscate.
Jim Jordan, who was shopping for a pardon from Trump, likely will chair the Judiciary Committee. Santos's future in the GOP is bright indeed!
Santos. I can't even anymore.
If I lied about my educational or employment history on my job application and HR found out, I would be fired on the spot. That's the policy; it's quite straightforward. Yet another example of how congress members aren't expected to live by the same rules the rest of us are. Why should we live by the rules they want to impose on us?? Asking for approximately 170,000,000 friends.
Among the GOP, truth has lost all meaning. In case we had any doubts, Santos has proven that. After all, he never said he was Jewish, he said he is Jew-ish.
I am throughly disgusted.
I am Irish. Everyone claims to be Ir-ish on St. Patrick’s Day. That is a joke that everyone is in on.
Claiming to be of Jewish descent and now claiming you are Jew-ish is not a joke. It is an outrage. And, it is a further outrage that more is not being done to push back on this so called “embellishment” by Santos.
There is a precisely zero percent chance that the GOP will punish Santos in any meaningful way, let alone kick him out of Congress, which is obviously what they should do. They care about power, nothing more.