Tag: U.S. Senate

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GOP U.S. Senate Viral Video WTF?!

WATCH: Near ‘Literal Brawl’ Starts When GOP Senator Threatens Union Leader Testifying Before Committee

In what was once known as “the greatest deliberative body on earth,” today, a Republican senator threatened to fight a union leader who was testifying before a hearing of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

Teamsters President Sean O’Brien was the witness, according to Mediaite, when Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) referenced several barbs the two men have traded in recent months.

For example, O’Brien posted this in June:

That led Mullin to tell O’Brien:

“Sir, I wish you was [sic] in the truck with me when I was building my plumbing company myself and my wife was running the office because I should remember working pretty hard and long hours. ‘Pretends like he’s self-made. What a clown, fraud always has been, always will be. Quit the tough guy act in these Senate hearings. You know where to find me. Any place, any time, cowboy.”

Mullin then added: “Sir, this is a time, this is a place. You want to run your mouth. We can be two consenting adults. We can finish it here.”

O’Brien: “Okay, that’s fine. Perfect.”

Mullin: “You want to do it now?”

O’Brien, accepting the challenge: “I’d love to do it right now.”

Mullin: “Well, stand your butt up, then.”

O’Brien: “You stand your butt up.”

As Mullin stood and started to take a ring off his finger, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) intervened:

“Hold it. Stop it. Stop it. No, no. Sit down. Sit down! You’re a United States senator!”

When O’Brien asked if he could respond to what Mullin had said, Sanders insisted he couldn’t, telling him, “No, you can’t. This is a hearing.”

Here’s the video:

The greatest deliberative body on earth? Sure, until a redneck like Markwayne Mullin tries to turn it into a boxing match.

 

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GOP U.S. Senate Viral Video

WATCH Josh Hawley Get His A*s Handed To Him When He Attacks DHS Secretary Mayorkas

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) was in full asshole mode today during a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee which featured testimony from Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas.

Hawley asked Mayorkas about a DHS officer who posted anti-Semitic messages on social media, according to Mediaite, including one “of a Hamas paraglider with a machine gun, and the caption ‘Free Palestine.'”

Another message from the same DHS official read, “F-ck Israel.”

That led Hawley to inquire, “Mr. Secretary, what’s going on here? Is this typical of people who work at DHS? This is an asylum & immigration officer who is posting these, frankly, pro-genocidal slogans and images on the day that Israelis are being slaughtered in their beds. What have you done about this?”

The secretary tried to answer, only to have Hawley ask, “Has she been fired.”

Mayorkas: “That individual has been placed in administrative leave.”

“So she has not been fired?” Hawley said, adding:

“Has she admitted, contrary to law, individuals who should not be in this country, or denied Jewish refugees, whose genocide she’s advocating, asylum that they deserve?”

Mayorkas said twice that he couldn’t discuss a personnel matter.

Hawley then began lecturing the DHS secretary:

“I can’t believe that you would come to this committee knowing about this! I’ve written to you about it. You know all about it! And you come here, and you’re unwilling to answer, and suggest that it’s wrong of me to even ask the question! Quite frankly, Mr. Secretary, I think that your performance is despicable and I think the fact that you’re not willing to provide answers to this committee is absolutely atrocious.”

Mayorkas asked, “Mr. Chairman, may I?”

The chair, Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) replied, “If you’d like to have a minute to respond —”

Mayorkas: “Oh, I would, and I’m not sure I’ll limit it to 60 seconds.”

Peters: “That’s fine.”

And that’s when Mayorkas let loose on Hawley.

“Number one, what I found despicable was the implication that — this language, tremendously odious — actually could be emblematic of the sentiments of the 260,000 men and women of the Department of Homeland Security, number one.”

“Number two, Sen. Hawley takes an adversarial approach to me in this question, and perhaps he doesn’t know my own background. Perhaps he does not know that I’m a child of a Holocaust survivor. Perhaps he does not know that my mother lost all of her family at the hands of the Nazis. And so, I find his adversarial tone to be entirely misplaced. I find it to be disrespectful of me and my heritage. And I do not expect an apology, but I did want to say what I just articulated.”

When Hawley asked if he could respond to the secretary, the chairman told him he couldn’t, so Mayorkas got the last word, or in this case, the last words.

Josh Hawley is going to lecture a man whose mother lost her family to the Holocaust on the dangers of anti-Semitism? Instead, he should do what he did on Jan. 6 and run away like the coward he is.

 

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GOP U.S. Senate

Tommy Tuberville May Be Illegally Serving In The Senate – Has Residency In Florida, Not Alabama

When he decided to run the United States Senate from the state of Alabama in 2000, former football coach Tommy Tuberville asserted that he owned a home in the city of Auburn, Alabama, meaning he met the residency requirements for the office he was seeking.

However, it now appears that Tuberville lied and is actually a resident of Florida, which would technically make him the Sunshine State’s third senator. That would be historic (and illegal) because the U.S. Constitution only allows for two senators for each the 50 states, according to a fascinating investigative piece from Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post.

The Alabama house in question is actually owned by Tuberville’s wife and son, neither of whom were on the 2020 ballot.

Tuberville’s office says his primary residence is an Auburn house that records show is owned by his wife and son. But campaign finance reports and his signature on property documents indicate that his home is actually a $3 million, 4,000-square-foot beach house he has lived in for nearly two decades in Santa Rosa Beach, Fla., located in the Florida Panhandle about 90 miles south of Dothan.

A Florida beach house? That’s right, and his address suggests Tuberville has been lying to voters in Alabama all along, because in his official paperwork for office, he claimed the Auburn home as where he lived.

In 2018, he voted in Florida in the midterm elections, according to the Birmingham News, but he registered to vote in Alabama on March 28, 2019, a week before announcing his Senate bid. For his voter registration address, he listed as his residence a property, appraised at about $300,000, located in Auburn.

The fact that Tuberville lives in Florida but is registered to vote in Alabama also suggests the senator may have committed voter fraud on at least one occasion since we can assume he voted for himself in the 2020 election.

Oh, and then there’s the tab Tuberville is running up as he travels to his Florida beach house when he leaves Washington to return “home,” whatever that particular word means to the senator.

Tuberville’s frequent visits as senator to his home in Santa Rosa Beach can be gleaned through expenditure reports filed with the Federal Election Commission by Tuberville’s various campaign organizations and PACs. They show that since Tuberville became a senator, there have been almost monthly expenditures for travel and food in either Santa Rosa Beach or another Florida town, Panama City Beach, which is 50 miles away.

Tuberville has attempted to dismiss any criticism of having been away from Alabama for many years by claiming to be a “carpetbagger of this country.” But while that may be a cute one-liner to feed the press and public, it doesn’t address the larger issue of the senator’s blatant disregard for both state and federal election law.

At a time when Republicans continue to try and make voting more difficult — especially for people of color — in the U.S., maybe Sen. Tuberville needs to sit down and explain his own blatant hypocrisy. That, or resign immediately and run against one of Florida’s actual senators, Marco Rubio and Rick Scott.

 

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GOP U.S. Senate WTF?!

WATCH: Mitch McConnell Freezes In Mid-Sentence – Has To Be Escorted Away By Colleagues

Something appears to be very wrong with the health of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and it was on full view for the world during a daily Senate GOP press conference today.

During his opening remarks Wednesday, McConnell uttered a couple of words and was then unable to continue any further, clearly losing the ability to talk.

The Kentucky Republican was quickly escorted away from the podium by Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) as Sen. John Thune (R-SD) took McConnell’s place at the microphone.

McConnell returned to the presser several minutes later, according to CNN’s Manu Raju and later appeared “sharp” when it was time for questions from the media.

CNN medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta said in his opinion McConnell “needs an exam…Time is critically important.”

McConnell is 81 and was hospitalized for a concussion and broken ribs after he fell earlier this year. Friends and colleagues say he has been moving with more caution (and more slowly) since the fall that caused the earlier injuries.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for Republicans to say that McConnell needs to step down from his Senate seat even though they repeatedly say President Joe Biden, 80, is unfit for office. The GOP, we’ve all seen, is little more than a collection of hypocrites collecting government salaries.

 

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Social Media U.S. Senate WTF?!

Twitter Explodes With Disgust After Kyrsten Sinema Posts Bizarre ‘Barbenheimer’ Photo Online

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), who desperately wants to remain marginally relevant as she watches her poll numbers for reelection in 2024 continue to slip, thought she’d found a novel way of inserting herself into a popular media trend that’s currently taking place at the box office.

CNN reports that it’s know as “Barbenheimer,” a mashup of two highly-anticipated movies that will be released on on the same day.

The films are “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.”

It’s the cinematic event of the summer: Greta Gerwig’s splashy pink romp “Barbie” and Christopher Nolan’s “emotionally devastating” three-hour epic “Oppenheimer” will roll out in theaters this Thursday. Aside from their prestige-y creative teams, the films have little in common, but dedicated cinephiles are devoting a full day of their lives to both. (“Barbie” is being released by Warner Bros., which shares parent company Warner Bros. Discovery with CNN.)

It’s the “Barbenheimer” double feature, and it started its life, as most phenomena do, as a meme. But as more people tweeted fan-made posters of Margot Robbie’s Barbie smiling in front of a mushroom cloud, the idea of a day spent at the movies started to sound like a good idea. (AMC said this week that 40,000 moviegoers already bought tickets to see both films on the same day — double the number it reported last week.)

That’s where the Arizona Democrat comes into the picture. Or at least the way she attempted to insert herself into a cultural phenomenon and gain free publicity to boot, posting this on Twitter.

What in the hell is that, Kyrsten? Are we supposed to be impressed? Hell, we’re not even amused. Why? Because we’re too busy being annoyed as we recall how you voted against a $15 minimum wage with a hateful thumbs down gesture.

Sinema’s latest faux pas got her pilloried on social media.