News bits: White supremacists at dinner & whatnot

Trump’s dinner party that went awry

NBC News writes:

‘F---ing nightmare’: Trump team does damage control after 

he dines with Ye and white supremacist Nick Fuentes

The former president's campaign claims he didn't know anything about Fuentes, who joined the rapper under fire for his antisemitic remarks

Former President Donald Trump distanced himself Friday from a pre-Thanksgiving dinner at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida with Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, and white supremacist Nick Fuentes, claiming he didn’t know the identity of the far-right activist who was unexpectedly brought along with the rapper.

“This past week, Kanye West called me to have dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Shortly thereafter, he unexpectedly showed up with three of his friends, whom I knew nothing about,” Trump said Friday in a statement on his Truth Social platform.

One can wonder, is Trump lying about not knowing who was at his own dinner party? There was this WaPo article entitled Trump’s false or misleading claims total 30,573 over 4 years.

Yeah, he’s lying. MAGA!!

Election fraud squads are laying goose eggs

while twiddling thumbs

The AP writes:

State-level law enforcement units created after the 2020 presidential election to investigate voter fraud are looking into scattered complaints more than two weeks after the midterms but have provided no indication of systemic problems.

That’s just what election experts had expected and led critics to suggest that the new units were more about politics than rooting out widespread abuses. Most election-related fraud cases already are investigated and prosecuted at the local level.

Florida, Georgia and Virginia created special state-level units after the 2020 election, all pushed by Republican governors, attorneys general or legislatures.

“I am not aware of any significant detection of fraud on Election Day, but that’s not surprising,” said Paul Smith, senior vice president of the Campaign Legal Center. “The whole concept of voter impersonation fraud is such a horribly exaggerated problem. It doesn’t change the outcome of the election, it’s a felony, you risk getting put in jail and you have a high possibility of getting caught. It’s a rare phenomena.”

From the shameless irrationality & hypocrisy files:

Election deniers flip flop and now decry voter suppression

Democracy Docket writes in an opinion piece:

In “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” Tom Wolfe wrote that “a liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested.” After this year’s midterm elections, I would add that a voting rights advocate is an election denier who lost a close election.

Ever since she lost her election for Arizona governor, Kari Lake has become deeply concerned with, of all things, voter suppression. Over the weekend, her campaign tweeted: “The appropriate amount of voter suppression is 0%.”

Left with no other option, Lake finds herself in the awkward position of blaming her loss on an unusual culprit for election deniers: voter suppression.

If you didn’t know better, you might think Lake was a champion of access to voting, supporter of funding for election officials and advocate for same day voter registration. She is none of those.

To the contrary, Lake has spent the last two years trafficking in election denying lies, bringing litigation to undermine voting rights and encouraging Arizona and other states to restrict, rather than expand, voting access. Though she now criticizes the state for its slow pace of counting ballots, she sued last summer to ban the use of electronic voting machines in Arizona and require that voters fill out paper ballots that are hand counted. Such a hand count would take weeks, if not longer, to complete.

Questions: What planet to these radical right Republican freaks live on? How stupid do they think we are?

Answers: Not Earth, and shockingly stupid.