Tag: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Fox News Says Four Out Of Five Doctors Prefer Mellow Taste Of Wildfire Smoke

Post By Politics , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Unless you have been under a rock, you know that some bad Canadian wildfires have sent smoke clouds to hover over American cities, mostly on the East Coast, and that New York in particular has broken all kinds of records for worst air quality ever. It’s nasty. It’s dangerous. The entire world looks orange. It looks like something out of Blade Runner. Major League Baseball postponed Yankees and Phillies games.

You know, unless none of that is true because you watch Fox News and Fox News says everything is fine.

If you watched Sean Hannity last night — and face it, some of y’all’s Nanas did — you heard that the skies over New York weren’t so bad, no big deal, nothing to worry about. Sean Hannity works out a lot and he’s fine, so why aren’t you fine, you snowflakes? Did you hear about how Sean Hannity works out a lot? He works out a lot. That’s why he has those muscles.

“I keep reading and hearing reports and people being interviewed, ‘I had a hard time breathing,’ and I’m like I’m walking in the same place you’re walking in and I don’t feel a thing! And I’m trying to understand, I work out regularly, so I think I’m relatively in tune with my body, I think if it was difficult, if I was having difficulty breathing, I would notice? But these are young people saying this! Are they all snowflakes?”

Sean Hannity loves to talk about working out. He is an MMA fighter guy! He’s very in tune with his muscle man body. And because of his working out skills and his muscles, he has the expertise to know if he’s having a hard time breathing. Why is everybody else such a snowflake?

Sean Hannity Knows What He’d Do If He Was Poland, He’d Be Like BAM! BAM! And Russia’d Be Like OH SH*T, YO!

In response, his halfwit guest Charly Arnolt just wanted to know if there was a correlation between the crackpipes she was reporting on the day before and the smoke in the air today. They agreed people just like to have things to complain about.

Hannity and Arnolt also spent time making fun of New Yorkers wearing masks to protect themselves from the smoke-filled air, because of course they did.

This is the flavor of Fox News right now. Protecting your lungs from orange hell fumes is woke, we guess. And admitting that forest fires are getting worse because of climate change is woke, although as Media Matters reports, Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal is fine with admitting that.

Not Fox News.

They made fun of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for bringing up the climate crisis. They made fun of people wearing masks. Judge Boxwine declared that “mask insanity” is back. Jesse Watters did his Little Man Syndrome dance about “our stupid neighbors up north,” made fun of Joe Biden, and got mad because the government is telling people to wear masks again.

Laura Ingraham brought on a cigarette and coal lobbyist named Steve Milloy, a climate change denierwho’s notorious for arguing on behalf of Philip Morris hat secondhand smoke isn’t so bad, to tell viewers there’s “no health risk” from this smoke.

This is the message Secondhand Smokey the Climate-Denying Bear wanted viewers to hear:

“Steve, no one’s denying it is unpleasant. My eyes are pretty itchy and watery, yesterday and a little bit today, and it might go on for a couple more days,” Ingraham said after introducing her guest. “But is this wholly out of the ordinary?”

“No. This happens anytime there’s a wildfire in the West. I mean, it’s unusual in the East. Look, the air is ugly, it’s unpleasant to breathe, and for a lot of people, they get anxiety over it. But the reality is there’s no health risk,” Milloy replied. “We have this kind of air in India and China all the time — no public health emergency.” (Both countries reportedlysee more than 1 million premature deaths a year from air pollution.)

“This doesn’t kill anybody, this doesn’t make anybody cough, this is not a health event,” he further explained.

“Particulate matter is very fine soot. It’s just carbon particles — they’re innocuous,” Milloy later added. “There’s nothing in them. They have no effect.”

If you want a two-minute demonstration of just how much Fox News hates its viewers and doesn’t care if they live or die, that’s a good clip to save.

So all that shit was weird. These people are so goddamned fucking weird.

And for REALLY REALLY weird, we close with Greg Kelly over on Newsmax, who seemed positively charmed by all the pretty orange smoke in his eyes. It’s a “beautiful, interesting aura,” he said. He of course allowed that “Our woke friends to the north in Canada, their forest fires got out of hand and, well, this is what we’re dealing with.” But it wasn’t so bad!

“I’ll tell you, it actually smells like wood smoke. It’s not an unpleasant odor, to be honest. It’s kind of weird when it seeps into the building, but outdoors, I can deal with it. Folks with respiratory issues though, that’s a real thing, a real complication.

“The White House is trying to exploit this, saying it’s all because of global warming and the normal talking points that go with that. I don’t think that’s the case. I think it’s a forest fire. This actually has happened a couple of times before in history. And for the time being, we can live with it. But it is pretty, it actually is pretty. It’s a beautiful, interesting aura the city has right now.”

American right-wing media is a pretty good indication that humanity is wrapping up as a species, don’t you think?

We were probably never meant to make it this far.

[Media Matters / Media Matters]

Follow Evan Hurst on Twitter right here.

Just got to BlueSky!

I have profiles those other places but I think I forgot how to log on.

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‘Where’s AOC’ trends as the Biden Administration puts kids in cages

Post By Politics , , , , , , , , , ,

Senator Ron Johnson is one of the people informing us that there are, in fact, kids in cages in America again:

So that led to the obvious question:

Hilariously, ‘Where’s AOC,’ is trending nationally because people are calling Alexandria Occasional-Cortex Ocasio-Cortez out. Here are some of the best examples:

A callback to when she pretended to be handcuffed.

We don’t think that is the real Alex Jones, but without reliable blue-check verification, who can know?

Of course, one liberal complained that somehow this was bullying:

No, criticizing a public figure is not bullying. It’s free speech.

Or maybe it is those evil Russians!

О черт, он к нам!!!

(We hope google translate worked for that joke. We wanted to say “oh crap, he’s onto us!!!” Our apologies to any Russian speakers if we said anything truly rude.)

Another Tweeter thought he nailed conservatives on this:

Actually, pointing out hypocrisy is not taking a stance on the substantive issue, but thanks for playing.

Naturally, the dragging extended into broader issues of hypocrisy than just AOC’s:

He’s not wrong.

Indeed, this person has the receipts:

Truly, an excellent thread. Well done!

The cold reality is that as long as minors are sent across the border illegally, accompanied or not, we will need to detain them. We frankly detain minors all the time, including citizens. Juvenile courts are filled with minors who commit crimes and, yes, they are regularly sent to prison. They are often held in jail awaiting trial for their alleged crimes. Typically, these involve special units for children, but we still confine them. It was nothing more than demagoguery for Democrats to pretend this was somehow wrong or even unusual, which is why they are doing it again, now that they are in charge, again. Sometimes children have to be detained. Every sane person wishes it was unnecessary, but every rational person knows that sometimes it has to be done. It is as simple as that.

***

Editor’s Note: Do you enjoy Twitchy’s conservative reporting taking on the radical left and woke media? Support our work so that we can continue to bring you the truth. Join Twitchy VIP and use the promo code SAVEAMERICA to get 40% off your VIP membership!



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Checks & Imbalances: Feds Investigate ByteDance, AOC Is Hiring

Post By World , , , , , , , , ,

Today we look at an investigation into ByteDance, a job opening with the Ocasio-Cortez campaign and tech leaders’ efforts to get a bailout for Silicon Valley Bank.

The FBI And DOJ Are Investigating ByteDance’s Use Of TikTok To Spy On Journalists

“The FBI and the Department of Justice are investigating the events that led TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to use the app to surveil American journalists, including this reporter, according to sources familiar with the departments’ actions,” reports Emily Baker-White:

According to a source in position to know, the DOJ Criminal Division, Fraud Section, working alongside the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, has subpoenaed information from ByteDance regarding efforts by its employees to access U.S. journalists’ location information or other private user data using the TikTok app. According to two sources, the FBI has been conducting interviews related to the surveillance. ByteDance’s use of the app to surveil U.S. citizens was first reported by Forbes in October, and confirmed by an internal company investigation in December.

“We have strongly condemned the actions of the individuals found to have been involved, and they are no longer employed at ByteDance. Our internal investigation is still ongoing, and we will cooperate with any official investigations when brought to us,” said ByteDance spokesperson Jennifer Banks. TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.

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Sens. Blackburn and Blumenthal Join Forbes To Discuss Bill To Keep Kids Safe Online

Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) join Brittany Lewis in “Forbes Newsroom” to discuss their bipartisan legislation, the Kids Online Safety Act.

50 Tech Leaders Circulated A Private Memo In Washington Calling For Action On SVB

“As SVB careened towards catastrophe, some 50 founders, VCs, economists and comms experts gathered in a WhatsApp group to draft a memo calling for urgent preservation of its deposits for the sake of the broader economy. Then they sent it to Washington,” reports Alex Konrad.

Just after 5:30 pm Pacific on Saturday, a memo started making the rounds among policymaker staff. Called “United States Cascade Bank Failure Scenario,” the private document laid out the case for why the U.S. government needed to take “decisive action” to avoid a continued bank run in the wake of the abrupt closure of Silicon Valley Bank.

“Today, most Americans assume the SVB failure is contained to the tech economy, but this is not true,” the document said, before laying out a primer on how SVB collapsed and the dire consequences for inaction — insolvency for regional banks, massive job cuts and the loss of banking services for wide swaths of the country, far from Silicon Valley. “The risks to the U.S. economy could be sudden, severe, and extensive,” it warned.

Whereas some prominent voices in tech took to Twitter for all-caps concern tweets, the memo was unsigned, but it was authored by a coterie of almost 50 leaders within and beyond the tech ecosystem. From Thursday through the weekend, they crowd-sourced information and coordinated ad hoc outreach to staffers in the California governor’s office, the White House, and to lawmakers like Ro Khanna, Katie Porter, Elizabeth Warren and JD Vance.

‘We Are Up Against A Fiscal Cliff’: Rep. Josh Brecheen Talks Budget And Economic Plans With Forbes

Rep. Josh Brecheen (R-Okla.) joins “Forbes Newsroom” to discuss his first term in Congress, the budget and debt ceiling negotiations and his top policy areas.

AOC Searching For New Campaign Manager After Previous One Blamed For Met Gala Fiasco

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is looking for a new campaign manager after her previous one was blamed for dropping the ball on payments related to her Met Gala appearance. That lapse led the House ethics office to find “substantial reason to believe” the congresswoman violated ethics laws by “accept[ing] impermissible gifts.”

In September 2021, the New York Democrat attended the Met Gala, famously wearing a white dress with “Tax the Rich” scrawled across the backside. That appearance led the nonpartisan Office of Congressional Ethics to launch an investigation. Its inquiry discovered that Ocasio-Cortez did not pay for her dress, hair styling, makeup and other services until after the investigation was launched, five months after the gala.

Ocasio-Cortez told investigators she planned to personally pay for those services and had authorized her campaign manager to coordinate payments with the vendors, according to a transcript of her interview. “I continued to follow up on this thing because it was stressing me out, and I genuinely do not know what had happened,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “I had continued to get this kind of holding pattern response [from her campaign manager].”

“I just never, ever, ever would have allowed that to happen knowing what I have learned, but that I wasn’t privy to the invoices,” the congresswoman said.

The campaign manager, who was still employed by Ocasio-Cortez at the time of her interview in May 2022, provided investigators with a similar account. The campaign manager said she didn’t pay for the dress as she didn’t think the invoice was final. She didn’t pay for the hairstylist until after it threatened to file a complaint with New York City’s Office of Labor Policy and Standards for Workers because the bill “fell off my radar,” and she didn’t have access to the congresswoman’s personal credit card. Overall, the campaign manager said, “other things kind of took precedence.”

The campaign manager’s name is not included in the transcripts, but other exhibits included in the investigation’s report identify her as Rebecca Rodriguez.

“The staffer is no longer with the campaign,” said Communications Director Lauren Hitt in a statement, declining to explain if the ethics investigation led to the split. Forbes was unable to reach Rodriguez for comment.

Ocasio-Cortez began looking for a new campaign manager on or before Feb. 7, according to the first date Google indexed the posting. Responsibilities for the position, which pays $120,000 to $165,000 a year, include “partnering with the candidate to design and oversee the campaign strategy, set and execute priorities, and manage a skilled team of staff, advisors, consultants, and volunteers in a community-focused, unconventional year-round campaign operation.”

Overseeing compliance is another responsibility. The ad does not mention that duty may include ensuring Ocasio-Cortez’s hairstylist receives prompt payments.

Tracking Trump

A musical collaboration between Donald Trump and a choir of individuals incarcerated for their alleged involvement in the Jan. 6 riot sold 22,500 digital downloads in the 11 days after its release, according to a music analytics firm.

“Justice for All” by Trump and the J6 Prison Choir debuted on March 3. The track interpolates the former president reciting the Pledge of Allegiance into “The Star-Spangled Banner,” sung by inmates housed at the Washington, D.C. jail. Trump is personally involved in the project.

By the following Friday, the track reached the top spot on the iTunes Store, which measures how many times a song was purchased. Through that day, the song had sold 4,800 digital downloads across iTunes and other retailers, according to the tracking service Luminate (formerly known as Nielsen). The track has remained on the top spot with digital downloads totaling 22,500 through Monday. “That strikes me as a substantial amount of downloads,” said an executive in the music-technology business not associated with the release, who asked not to be named given the contentious nature of the song.

The music executive noted that consumers have moved away from downloading songs, opting instead to stream them. “Justice for All” was streamed on-demand 600,000 times across audio and video between March 3 and March 13, according to Luminate. “That’s not a ton,” said the music executive. “You often see a song that really takes off get millions and millions of streams in the first few days. That’s less impressive than the downloads.” That play count was not enough for “Justice for All” to land on Apple Music or Spotify’s streaming charts.

The song also has not reached Billboard’s charts. But Erica Knight, a spokesperson for Kash Patel, a former Trump administration staffer who is involved with the recording, said she expects to see the song on multiple charts when they are released next week.

Sales of a $100 vinyl version are “significant,” Knight claimed, declining to provide actual sales figure.

“Justice for All” costs $1.29 on the iTunes Store. Profits are slated to benefit the families of people imprisoned for their alleged roles in the Capitol riot.

Watch: Your correspondent joined Brittany Lewis on “Forbes Newsroom” to discuss Trump and the prisoner’s track.

*****

Gilson Machado Guimarães Neto, Brazil’s former Minister of Tourism under Jair Bolsonaro, met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

*****

Rep. Mark Alford (R-Mo.) “had the opportunity of a lifetime” on Tuesday when an unnamed group ostensibly rented out Mar-a-Lago to raise money for Republicans running for Congress.

Across Forbes

In Closing

Private eyes

They’re watching you

They see your every move

— Daryl Hall & John Oates, “Private Eyes”



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Checks & Imbalances: AOC’s Dress, Hair And Makeup Likely The Focus Of Ethics Investigation

Post By World , , , , , , ,

Today we go deep into the ethics investigation into Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

This is the web edition of the free Checks & Imbalances newsletter, usually sent to inboxes on Fridays. You can subscribe here. Please support this work, if you can, by subscribing to Forbes.

Why Is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Under Investigation? Probably For Her Dress, Makeup And Hairstyling At The Met Gala

News broke two months ago that one of America’s most-polarizing lawmakers was facing an ethics probe. No one is willing to officially explain the rationale behind the investigation, but Forbes’ reporting all points to one glamorous night on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

I

t was September 2021, around the time that the world was beginning to emerge from lockdown, when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez showed up at one of the flashiest parties in America, the Met Gala. The congresswoman came with a message, delivered via her strapless gown. On the backside of the white dress, scrawled in blood-red lettering, were the words “Tax The Rich.”

As Ocasio-Cortez spoke to the line of cameras near the entrance, her outfit blared the message to monied guests passing by, including billionaire Tory Burch and centimillionaire Kris Jenner. The moguls were not the only ones eyeing the dress. Photos of the gown instantly blew up online, prompting a viral mix of praise and outrage that even the Kardashian family would envy. In Washington, meanwhile, a different set of onlookers took interest for a more consequential reason—the attire indicated a possible violation of House ethics rules.

The one-of-a-kind dress, which Ocasio-Cortez helped create for the occasion, did not belong to the congresswoman. Congressional guidelines generally prevent lawmakers from accepting gifts. Ocasio-Cortez claimed that she “borrowed” the piece from its designer, Aurora James, an acclaimed artist known for working with people like Beyoncé. It’s harder to borrow hair styling and makeup, which Ocasio-Cortez also received from acclaimed artists.

Even if Ocasio-Cortez had, in fact, borrowed a more standard gown, it still could have caused her to violate House gift rules, according to Kendra Arnold, the executive director of the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust. “Borrowing is not allowed, and the primary reason for that is because it could be simply used as a way to evade all of the ethics rules,” says Arnold. “As soon as she said that she had ‘borrowed items,’ we believed that it was indicative of a gift.”

Added Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in government ethics and has been highly critical of politicians on both sides of the aisle: “It’s not obvious to me how she could have accepted them.”

The Met Gala has caused ethics problems for others, as well. Another New York Democrat, former Rep. Carolyn Maloney, faced an investigation from the Office of Congressional Ethics over her attendance at the event. As part of that probe, the ethics office secured receipts and documents that showed Maloney paid for dresses she wore to the gala in 2018, 2019 and 2021. Maloney also provided documentation showing that she paid for her hairstyling and makeup.

A spokesperson for Ocasio-Cortez, Lauren Hitt, declined to answer questions. “The ethics committee’s statement did not comment on the subject of their review and so, out of respect for their ongoing process, neither will we,” Hitt said, adding that the congresswoman is cooperating with the investigation.

The dress designer also declined to comment. The hair stylist and makeup artist who helped Ocasio-Cortez prepare for the evening did not respond to requests for comment. Vogue, which published footage of Ocasio-Cortez getting ready for the gala and whose editor, Anna Wintour, oversees the event, also did not respond to inquiries.

If Ocasio-Cortez had taken care of her own clothes, hair and makeup, her mere presence at the gala might have been enough to prompt ethics concerns, given that tickets to the event reportedly go for $35,000. The morning after the party, the congresswoman took to Instagram to defend her attendance. “BEFORE anybody starts wilding out,” she wrote, “NYC elected officials are regularly invited to and attend the Met due to our responsibilities in overseeing our city’s cultural institutions that serve the public. I was one of several in attendance.”

That explanation did not make much sense to Tom Jones, founder of the American Accountability Foundation, which called for an ethics investigation into Ocasio-Cortez the day after the party. “The idea that this is somehow constituent service is a joke,” he said. “I’ve worked in congressional offices. Constituent services is going out to the local community-development organization and helping them set up a food bank or saying, ‘I can help you complete this grant application in a way so that you can get funds to serve your community.’ It’s not going to a $35,000-a-year gala, listening to rock stars, looking beautiful and driving some lefty message.”

Ocasio-Cortez’s suggestion that other people in her position attend the event does not entirely hold up, either. Asked if members of Congress receive invitations to the gala, a spokesperson for the Met said that citywide officers, like the mayor and parks commissioner, typically get invitations, but did not mention congresspeople. As for whether or not House investigators have contacted anyone at the museum regarding Ocasio-Cortez’s appearance, the spokesperson said that the Met doesn’t comment on active investigations.

Additionally, lists of government officeholders who were supposed to be invited to the Met Gala in 2016 and 2018 show zero members of Congress. Only one other federal lawmaker appeared in Vogue’s 182-photo recap of “every celebrity look” from the 2021 gala: Maloney, a congresswoman who, unlike Ocasio-Cortez, represented a part of New York City right by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Voters ousted Maloney from Congress during last year’s primary, so House ethics officials probably won’t say much more about the investigation into her. The committee on ethics, however, has promised to provide an update on its inquiry into Ocasio-Cortez sometime after its first meeting of the new Congress. It’s not clear when that will be. Kevin McCarthy won an election to become speaker of the House on Jan. 7, but the first meeting for the committee has yet to be scheduled.

Watch: Your correspondent joined “Forbes Newsroom” to discuss the investigation into Ocasio-Cortez.

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Exhibits In Maloney Report Underscore Just What A Met Invite Can Do

Readers of this newsletter are probably already aware of what favors and money can buy in D.C., but two emails from Met officials included in the ethics report into Maloney put it all on display.

When the congresswoman learned she would not be invited to the Met Gala in 2016, “she went on about how much she does for the Met, always responsive when you call, and proactive re the institutions concerns in DC,” according to the Met’s president at the time, Emily Rafferty, in an email to her colleagues.

In another email, Thomas Schuler, the museum’s chief government affairs officer, points out that inviting New York power players to a dinner “paid off handsomely” as the museum went on to obtain $7.9 million in new capitol funding from the city. “The first significant allocation in a number of years,” he wrote.

‘Change The Math’: Inside Democratic Rep. Sean Casten’s Legislation To Expand Congress

Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) joins Brittany Lewis to discuss his new package, “A Common Sense Vision for American Democracy,” which would add more members of the Senate and House as well as institute changes to the Supreme Court.

Continuing Irresolutions

Updates on Checks & Imbalances’ previous reporting

Former Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) joined DLA Piper’s regulatory and government affairs practice, the law (and lobbying) firm announced this week. DLA Piper has plenty of connections in the nation’s capital. Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff worked there before his wife, Kamala Harris, became vice president. Former Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) is currently a partner at the firm.

While in office, Burr raised $570,000 to aid in his legal defense after facing scrutiny over stock trades he made at the onset of the pandemic. The Department of Justice closed its investigation without filing charges. Chambliss’ wife, Julianne, donated $2,500 to Burr’s fund.

Meanwhile, Chambliss left the Senate in 2015, but his campaign committee remains active. In 2021 and 2022, it donated $34,000 to political campaigns.

*****

“James O’Keefe, the founder and chairman of Project Veritas, has taken a paid leave from the conservative nonprofit media organization as its board considers whether to remove him from his leadership position,” New York Magazine reported on Wednesday.

Project Veritas paid O’Keefe more than $2.7 million between 2012 and 2021. In 2021, his salary dropped by $16,000 from the previous year.

*****

Last week, a judge fined the attorney for former Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb.) $500 for making an improper closing argument in the congressman’s trial. John Littrell was sanctioned for “his representations about what Fortenberry would have said if he had testified.” In March, Fortenberry was found guilty of concealing information and making false statements to the FBI. He resigned from Congress a week later. Fortenberry, who was sentenced to two years of probation, has appealed his conviction.

*****

ETFs that aim to track the stock trades of Democratic (Ticker: NANC) and Republican (Ticker: KRUZ) members of Congress debuted Tuesday on the CBOE BZX exchange. The ETFs are a partnership between Subversive Capital Advisor and Unusual Whales, an options-flow platform that also monitors lawmakers’ securities transactions.

Tracking Trump

“A former Twitter employee-turned-whistleblower told the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday that the Trump White House urged it remove a 2019 Tweet by celebrity Chrissy Teigen insulting then-President Donald Trump—a claim that contests Republicans’ narrative that Democrats colluded with Twitter to suppress conservatives content on the site,” reports Sara Dorn.

*****

The campaign for Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.) spent $950 at Trump’s Bedminster, N.J. golf course in December. Trump previously endorsed Tenney.

*****

Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro was at Trump’s Miami resort last weekend to speak at Turning Point USA’s Power of the People event.

Across Forbes

In Closing

“Listen to me, don’t listen to me

Talk to me, don’t talk to me

Dance with me, don’t dance with me

No

Beep-beep”

— David Bowie, “Fashion”



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GOP Hunts For Hunter Biden’s Wangus, Finds Trump Sobbing About Chrissy Teigen ‘Pussy Ass Bitch’ Tweet Instead

Post By Politics , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

GOP Rep. James Comer’s House Oversight Committee is holding a hearing today about the Biden campaign’s apparently unreasonable requests that Twitter take down pictures of Hunter Biden’s wing-wang in the run-up to the 2020 election. Also, Twitter censored a New York Post story about LAPTOP111!1 for like six seconds. All of this obviously stole the election from its rightful winner, Donald Trump.

Strangely, though, former Twitter execs have testified that actually thin-skinned Donald Trump was the one who called Twitter whining and begging for tweets that hurt his feelings to be taken down. Specifically, there was that time Chrissy Teigen called him a “pussy ass bitch.”

He was very, very upset about that.

Here’s that tweet, for posterity and forever:

And here’s a screen-grabbed version, in case Elon hears this and breaks his leg sprinting for the delete button.

Twitter

Teigen has responded:

So there’s your TWITTER FILES. And that’s how things are going in that House Oversight Committee hearing today. James Comer’s hearing about how Twitter hid Hunter Biden’s penis under a bushel instead of letting its light shine where Republicans can bask in it.

Boy are we glad Republicans are in control and can do “oversight” now.

Democratic ranking member Jamie Raskin opened the hearing eloquently explaining what a fucking waste of time it is to investigate Hunter Biden’s wing-wang and his laptop. He explained that Twitter, as a private company, was allowed to do whatever it wanted with New York Post articles about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Former Twitter executives gave some truly fascinating testimony about the company’s failures before the domestic terrorist attack of January 6, and how the company actually worked to make sure world war three didn’t start on Twitter after Donald Trump assassinated that Iranian general. They talked about Russian disinfo on the platform. They’ve talked about a number of interesting things.

In response, Republicans have thrown poo, because these fucking morons are so delusional they really think this laptop would have prevented the most hated man in the world from losing the election. They’ve babbled about how Matt Taibbi and Elon Musk have proven that Twitter was a “subsidiary of the FBI.” (That was Nancy Mace, being a full of shit liar.)

Jim Jordan has been blabbing all day, but you can just watch this seven seconds and skip the rest:

And then watch Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly making fun of Jim Jordan for sucking at Congress:

Connolly beat the shit out of Republicans the whole time, and that’s how we got to the whole thing about Chrissy Teigen calling Trump a “pussy ass bitch” and Trump CRYYYYYYYYING about it to Twitter.

Just watch this clip.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez kicked a whole lot of ass too, about what a waste of time and resources this hearing was, about how actually Twitter bent over backward constantly to accommodate Donald Trump, and finally about the lying campaigns of the Libs of TikTok account against LGBTQ+ people and children that are proliferating this very day.

Wanna hear what Marjorie Taylor Greene sounds like when she’s MAD? She is MAD Twitter broke the law (no) by suspending her, and she is MAD that Twitter colluded with the CIA and the DHS and the Deep State to shadow-ban all the conservatives, and she is MAD that Twitter wouldn’t let anybody learn about curing COVID with horse paste, and oh boy, if she was your mom and she was yelling at you, you would laugh and laugh and laugh, and then you’d get in more trouble because you’re not supposed to laugh when mom is yelling at you.

Then she called former Twitter exec Yoel Roth a pedophile to his face, in case you wondered how vile she really is.

Congress is forever stained by that bigoted, lying piece of homophobic human trash.

But on to better things!

Remember wonderful brilliant Dan Goldman, who was the House Democrats’ lawyer for Donald Trump’s first impeachment, and who is now a member of Congress from New York? He took some time to explain chapter and verse how full of bullshit and false information that New York Post Hunter Biden story was in the first place, literally from its first paragraph. Man it pissed James Comer off.

Watch all these videos:

Part two. Keep watching, he is so fucking great. Goldman all but accuses Comer here of abusing his power as committee chair and wasting taxpayer money on a “fishing expedition into a civilian child of a president for political purposes.”

Part three:

Welcome to Congress, Rep. Goldman!

Monumentally stupid Louisiana Republican Rep. Clay “WHAR BOXES” Higgins is pretty sure all the Twitter employees who testified today are gonna get an ARRESTIN’:

And that seems like a good place to start wrapping it up.

Want to hear more about the “pussy ass bitch” thing, since that is the most important fact that will ever come out of Kevin McCarthy’s House of Representatives? Yeah you do.

Amazing amazing amazing. No notes. Every day is stupider than the last.

As of this writing, the hearing is ongoing. We are sure it will continue to be just as productive as the last several hours have been. If you want to see more clips, obviously Rupar and Acyn are live-tweeting.

But we are done.

OPEN THREAD.

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WATCH: Democrats Kick Living Sh*t Out Of Republicans Removing Ilhan Omar From Foreign Affairs Committee

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We discussed this week how Barely Speaker Kevin had managed to wrangle up the votes to subject Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar to more racism and bullying, under the guise of expelling Omar from the House Foreign Affairs Committee because she is “antisemitic.” (Their proofs for this were, shall we say, limp and flaccid.) We highly doubt the votes materialized because of Kevin McCarthy’s negotiating prowess. Occam’s Razor would suggest that any holdout Republicans just remembered they hate minorities and were like JK fuck yeah we’ll do that.

McCarthy is doing this for retaliatory reasons, because he’s mad Democrats expelled his new BFF QAnon Marge Greene and white nationalist Paul Gosar from their committees. He’s doing it because he’s a fucking child, and this is his way of saying “neener.” He’s doing this because he’s a little tiny sad man and this makes him feel powerful.

Look at this fucking troll doll.

Oh! Kevin McCarthy is so offended that Ilhan Omar said “all about the Benjamins!” Obviously you see the Kevin McCarthy tweet Rupar found just below that, but if you can’t, it says “We cannot allow Soros, Steyer, and Bloomberg to BUY this election!” But it’s not antisemitic when McCarthy says it, because reasons.

The vote was today, and Omar was removed from that committee. But not before a bunch of Democrats had a chance to stand up and tell white supremacist Republicans to go eat bags of dicks in hell.

Rep. Eric Swalwell didn’t hold back. He noted how Republicans “root for rioters,” “show sympathy for the insurrection,” are a conference that “harbors a wanted international criminal,” and have “members who choose violence over voting every single day.” He said he figured when they said they were going to hold somebody accountable for antisemitism, it would be Jim Jordan, since he kept that “Kanye. Elon. Trump” tweet up on the House Judiciary Committee GOP account for two months after Kanye started levying Nazi attacks against Jewish people. (Jordan writes those tweets.)

“Look in your own damn mirror before you ever come over here!” he shouted.

Swalwell, of course, was just the other day a victim of McCarthy’s insolent little revenge campaign, when McCarthy removed him from the Intelligence Committee.

The other victim of that was Rep. Adam Schiff, who also had some things to say. He said if they want to punish somebody for inciting violence, introduce a resolution against Donald Trump. “Nobody has incited more violence against this chamber than Donald Trump.” And antisemitism? “Do not insult our intelligence,” he said.

Want to condemn someone? How about “someone dining with antisemites? Someone dining with white nationalists? Members of your conference who are speaking at white nationalist rallies.” He mentioned Trump again, and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar.

And on and on it went like that. People pointing out the hypocrisy, people pointing out the lies. Rep. Mark Pocan and others noted how Republicans seat on committees a person who believes “Jewish space lasers set forest fires in California.” Rep. Pramila Jayapal put a fine point on how Republicans are doing this because they have nothing of real value to offer the American people, just this “inane” shit.

Rep. Dean Phillips is Jewish. He said a lot, and you should watch it all, but he made an important point when he asked why 90 percent of the Jewish people in Congress are just fine with keeping Omar on her committees? Because isn’t this Kevin McCarthy supposedly protecting them from mean Ilhan Omar? Fucking please.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Whew. Back up and make some room for her, because she is ready to fuck you all up. “This is about targeting women of color in the United States!” And so much more.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib was furious to the point of tears, and we guess House Republicans didn’t want to hear it, so they gaveled her to shut her up and cut her mic:

And here is Rep. Omar herself, defending herself against the tsunami of white supremacy coming at her from the other side of the aisle. “Is anyone surprised that I am being targeted?” she asked. She took it all the way back to the Trump-led movement to label Barack Obama a Muslim. This is who these people are.

www.youtube.com

“My leadership and voice will not be diminished if I am not on this committee for one term. My voice will get louder and stronger and my leadership will be celebrated around the world as it has been! So take your votes or not, I am here to stay, and I am here to be a voice against harms around the world and advocate for a better world. I yield back.”

In other words, go fuck yourself, Kevin, and go fuck yourself, all the rest of you seditious white supremacist Republican snakes. The end.

Follow Evan Hurst on Twitter right here!

And once that doesn’t exist, I’m also giving things a go at the Mastodon (@[email protected]) and at Post!

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