There is a reason Chris Christie is unemployed.

Why raise taxes on the top 1% by a few points when we can make EVERYONE work longer.

Fcuk you, Chris.

Republicans are vile enablers.

These moments totally happened at the GOP primary debate

WaPo satirist Alexandra Petri add her spin on the Republican primary debate. This is a gift 🎁 link so that those who do not subscribe to The Washington Post can read the entire article. Below are some excerpts. Enjoy! 😁

If you said, “Would you like to watch Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Doug Burgum, Mike Pence, Asa Hutchinson and Chris Christie talk to each other for two hours? FYI, the place where they’ll do so is hotter than Beelzebub’s armpit!,” I would have said, “No, thank you.” But if you said, “The alternative is watching Donald Trump talk to Tucker Carlson on the website formerly known as Twitter,” I would say, “I can’t wait to hear what Ron, Vivek, Nikki, Tim, Doug, Mike, Asa and Chris have to say!” [...] Here is approximately how it went. Bret Baier: Hello. We have brought a bell just because we enjoy the sound of a bell. Martha MacCallum: Feel free to speak over it; it will give the evening a fun, musical vibe. Baier: Yes, and speaking of music, candidates, the number one song in America is something called “Rich Men North of Richmond”! Governor DeSantis, introduce yourself by providing a close reading of the subtle lyrics of this song. DeSantis: Hang on, first I have some prepared remarks! Joe Biden’s basement! Hunter Biden’s paintings! “Rich Men North of Richmond”! Taxes! Florida! Baier: Chris Christie, why would you be better as president? Christie: Bret, I have spent the last four years sailing around sharpening my traffic-cone harpoon for my hated foe (from hell’s heart I spit my last breath at him!), and the one question I did not expect was about a scenario where I could actually become president. Uh, I was governor of New Jersey? So, take that for what it’s worth.

[See more under the cut.]

Scott: I have come to this debate with some specific numbers at my fingertips! I was told everyone would be excited about specific numbers! If not, I would really like those hours back. Ramaswamy: Hello! You may be wondering, who is this skinny guy with a funny name? I’m not a politician who is going to offer you a series of prepared, meaningless platitudes. I’m a businessman with no political experience who is going to offer you a series of prepared, meaningless platitudes. Isn’t it time we stopped running away from things and started running toward things? I am not running for president so much as I am running for the title of Favorite Grandson of your Fox News grandmother. Have you ever considered that people don’t love God anymore? [...] Pence: Hello! I am here to recite scripture and keep referring to the Trump-Pence administration, and I’m all out of scripture. That was some Mike Pence humor; I will never be out of scripture! I am unquestionably the best-prepared person in this race, the single individual with the experience that is closest to being the president, with no exceptions that spring to mind. I have been in the hallway. I have been in the White House. Do you like what my administration did with the Supreme Court? [...] Ramaswamy: You think now is the time for incremental reform. I think it is the time for actual revolution. Pence: Good Lord, no thank you. I do not have any revolutionary proposals. I believe in mild, small, incremental change. Except for a nationwide 15-week ban on abortion, which I want to implement because I promised it to God. Haley: Let’s be realistic! Women hate hearing this. Let’s just admit that it will never happen. But we’re all going to say we want it to happen! But, ladies, it’s not going to happen. [...] Young Person: Please tell me that anyone on this stage believes in climate change, the only issue I care about because I anticipate living on this planet for at least 60 years. I am starting to get worried. Can we have a show of hands? DeSantis: No! We are not schoolchildren! We will not raise our hands or acknowledge the existence of science! Ramaswamy: As the only one on this stage who is not bought and paid for, I have a thought. Christie: I have had enough of a guy who sounds like ChatGPT and stole his opening gambit from Barack Obama. I came here to bludgeon Donald Trump verbally, but Trump is not here and I have a lot of verbal bludgeoning built up. [...] Baier: Why do we have homelessness, drugs and crime? Pence: Because Democrats talked about defunding the police, and everyone knows that if you say “Defund the police!” into a mirror three times, crime appears. It’s just science, or, as Governor DeSantis and I prefer, religion. Christie: I disagree. Crime went up because Hunter Biden did it.

Please use the gift link above to read the rest of Petri's cutting satire.

Just one thing I would like to comment on though. I grew up in NJ... BEYOND the exits on the Turnpike. Why does there always have to be a NJ joke?🤦🏻‍♀️There really are nice parts of NJ. Really. I mean it. 😉

[edited]

Chris Christie

Christie Drops Out | Trump: A President Can Assassinate Rivals | Celebs Ruin RFK Jr.’s Birthday

Good riddance. Trump denied Crispy his dream job to work in the Administration so now he's on a bitter mission to destroy this country in exchange for riches.

"Chris Christie is caught on a hot mic ahead of his expected announcement that he's dropping out of the presidential race:

He says Nikki Haley is "gonna get smoked" and a "petrified" Ron DeSantis called him. pic.twitter.com/fGOFEtVDHn

— The Recount (@therecount) January 10, 2024

Presidential nomination drop-out Chris Christie appeared to be caught on a hot mic before his quitting speech on Wednesday night.

In the audio below, Christie can be heard lamenting his inability to connect with voters with his anti-Trump message – “they don’t wanna hear it” – as well as explaining that Nikki Haley is going “to get smoked” in the primary."

“She spent $16M so far… $59M by DeSantis, and we spent 12. I mean, who’s punching above their weight and who’s getting a return on their investment?” Christie said, bungling what was certain to be his attempt to endorse Haley through New Hampshire to have her run neck and neck against Trump. “She’s going to get smoked, you and I know it, she’s not up to this,” he added, before going on to explain how Ron DeSantis had called him, describing the Florida Governor as “petrified.”

I think we knew that a federal indictment of former president Donald Trump would elicit a collective primal scream from the right-wing fever swamp — and they have not disappointed.

In true Trump-era fashion, the response from most elected Republicans has been a collective whine about "unfairness" and the "weaponization" of the "deep state." Some have even gone so far as to at least hint around that it's a nice little country we have here, be a shame if anything happened to it. I would expect nothing less. This is how they roll.

There are, notably, a few dissenters from that party line.

Utah Sen. Mitt Romney put out a statement saying that Trump "brought this on himself" and it's "consistent with his other actions offensive to the national interest," which is true. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a 2024 GOP hopeful, said "these facts are devastating," which is also true. But they, and a handful of others, are outliers among GOP elected officials.

One very significant former GOP official has come out swinging, however:

There are a number of Trump defenses out there. But the main talking point, which we can assume was coordinated, is that this is a political prosecution engineered by President Biden to take out his most threatening political rival. And their main proof of this is that the Department of Justice (DOJ) declined to prosecute Hillary Clinton. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina probably articulated this the best, including the deployment of some very emotional righteous indignation:

He's not saying it's ok, he's just saying that Hillary Clinton got off so that cancels out Trump's crimes. Or something.

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wi. says that Trump refused to prosecute Clinton but Joe Biden sent in a SWAT Team to torment Trump:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sounded the same theme:

“Is there a different standard for a Democrat secretary of state versus a former Republican president? I think there needs to be one standard of justice in this country. Let's enforce it on everybody and make sure we all know the rules.”

It wasn't a perfect defense of Trump but as long as he makes sure to condemn Hillary Clinton is probably good enough for the moment.

As much as I loathe the idea of re-litigating "but her emails," I'm sorry to say that it's necessary. There was almost no pushback to this talking point from the media, probably because they didn't get the Clinton story right in the first place. A few have since stepped up to point out that Clinton didn't refuse to cooperate with the government, as Trump did, although Trump and his accomplices will no doubt cry inanely about her "bleaching the emails" and "smashing the phones" and that will be enough to sustain the argument. Trump may even say "Russia, if you're listening" again. But those allegations are just plain silly and always have been. And the fact that she didn't obstruct the investigation is only part of the story.

As it happened, Clinton copied all work emails to the State Department system so they had them. The Justice Department inspector general issued a report in 2018 about the FBI Investigation and determined that the people tasked with marking documents as classified had not done so clearly. Moreover, only three email chains "contained any classification markings of any kind," and they were low-priority "call sheets" marked with the lowest priority of classification, which had info and details for Clinton to refer to when talking to a foreign leader. There were no nuclear secrets or war plans among them, needless to say.

The State Department under Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo did two separate investigations and found in 2019 that there was "there was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information" and that Clinton bore no "individual culpability."

And let's dispense with the "magnanimous" Trump defense. Trump tried desperately to get the DOJ to investigate Clinton (and many others he considered his political enemies.) His White House counsel told him that the DOJ operated independently and if he ordered it there would be tremendous unrest from career officials and massive political blowback. That didn't stop him. He conspired with Matthew Whittaker, then an assistant to then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to get Sessions to assign a Special Counsel to investigate Clinton. In the end, they succeeded in getting Sessions to assign John Huber, a US Attorney in Utah to look into all the allegations against Clinton, including the bogus "Uranium One" scandal which had also already been dismissed. That investigation didn't turn up anything either.

Notably, when Bill Barr became Attorney General he looked into all of it and also came up with nothing. If anyone thinks that Barr wouldn't have prosecuted Clinton if he could have doesn't recall just how much he hates her guts. The evidence just wasn't there. So, the FBI, the DOJ Inspector General, two State Department probes, a Clinton-hating attorney general and a U.S. Attorney assigned to review all the evidence found that Clinton committed no crimes. (I'm not even counting the 10 Benghazi investigations which were the genesis of the email scandal —- and also came up empty.)

I know your eyes have glazed over by this point and you wonder why in the world anyone should care about this. And frankly, we shouldn't have to. It's long settled ancient history. But the right's "whatboutism" and the media's continued unwillingness to acknowledge that, once the FBI determined there was no crime, there was no crime, I fear that a lot of people who aren't already down the right wing rabbit hole will be persuaded that this is a partisan prosecution simply because of the words "classified documents."

When former FBI Director James Comey held that first notorious press conference in the summer of 2016, in which he larded with inappropriate personal judgments about Clinton, he laid out the criteria the Justice Department uses when it decides whether to prosecute classified documents cases. He said:

“In looking back at our investigations into mishandling or removal of classified information, we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts. All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice. We do not see those things here.”

Assuming they have proof of the charges in the Trump indictment, there can be little doubt that they met three of those four criteria, (the fourth being disloyalty to the United States which I believe to be true as well.) So when you see these Republicans emitting their epic whines about how unfair all this is because Hillary didn't get indicted, keep in mind that it wasn't for lack of Trump trying to get it done. It was because, unlike him, she didn't break the law. And even Jeff Sessions, Rex Tillerson, Mike Pompeo and Bill Barr couldn't find a way to make it so.

In case you were wondering, yes the House Republicans are considering a new investigation into —- you guessed it —- her emails. Because of course they are.

Three of Trump's rivals for the GOP nomination say they would pardon Trump for his crimes if they get elected president.

The leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination faces 91 criminal charges, nearly half of which are at the federal level. And yet his two main GOP rivals have said they would pardon him if they’re elected. [ ... ] While campaigning in the days leading up to the first votes of 2024’s Republican primary elections, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley have both signalled they would grant clemency to the former president because it would be in the nation’s “interest” to do so. [ ... ] Republican officials and Mr Trump’s GOP rivals for the 2024 nomination have largely rushed to his defence after his indictments. Vivek Ramaswamy pledged to pardon Mr Trump shortly after he was federally indicted in the Mar-a-Lago case. [ ... ] Pardoning him would merely prove that the US does have “two systems of justice,” GOP rival Chris Christie told supporters in New Hampshire last week. But not the kind that Mr Trump believes. “One for all of us and one for the most powerful,” Mr Christie said. “If we allow that to happen as a country, we would be no better – no better – than a lot of these tin-pot democracies around the world who treat the privileged different than they treat everyday citizens.”

Asa Hutchinson, who is technically still in the race, reasserted that he would not pardon Trump.

Republican Asa Hutchinson won't pardon Trump if he's convicted

So here's the GOP Trump pardon scoreboard...

It's worth noting that President Gerald Ford gave a full pardon to Richard Nixon a month after he succeeded the disgraced Nixon. The pardon was highly unpopular and was likely a factor in Ford's narrow defeat by Democrat Jimmy Carter in the 1976 election.

Pardons for Trump might play well with the MAGA base but would be much less popular with the broader public.

How did Ronda Scantmonius ever get elected in the first place?

Floridians-

What the hell is wrong with you?

Toxic masculinity can be funny when it's just two nasty ass old white men sniping at each other like church moms.

All The Freaks Who Want To Be The Next Trump | SOME MORE NEWS

Christie, Haley and Pence are the most sane ones up there

Chris Christie

I don't know how anybody could want to be in the United States if they don't love America and you cannot love America if you don't love every American. Love the Americans who look different than you. Love the Americans who speak different than you. Love the Americans who think different than you, love the Americans who believe and have faith that is different than yours. We have had Donald Trump and other candidates in this race say they don't want people coming to this country if they're not of our religion. We don't have a religion in America. Our Constitution is founded on there being no national religion. Yet we're abandoning that to by continuing to respond positively to the siren song of someone who would actually say something like that as a candidate for president, the United States met to only divide.

Chris Christie Suspends Presidential Campaign. Full Transcript of Remarks. - 2024 Presidential Campaign Blog