I have only read the yahoo article I linked and have not seen it read other descriptions so this is a bit of an assumption. My understanding is she was brought in as an expert witness because of her role in Muslim advocacy and efforts against bigotry. She had answered numerous questions up to that point, and things had been professional. Her initial response was in line with the type of responses she had been giving without issue.
Kennedy wanted to grandstand. Notice his first question was about her status in the Democratic Party. Only after establishing she was one of them did he proceed to the terrorist stuff.
Her role as an aid worker for Palestinian people means she deals with UNRWA, the UN agency for providing aid to the Palestinians. Despite transparency over who works for UNRWA and other safeguards, there was evidence some aid workers assisted the Oct 7 attacks. They were fired, but that has fueled rumors that UNRWA is entangled with Hamas.
Those are the “facts” that set the stage for Kennedy’s assertions. What is crucial to note, and nobody seems to have mentioned yet, is that his real target was not Ms. Berry. She was just the mechanism and the pathway. His real target was to discredit the Democratic Party as collaborators with the Oct. 7 attacks.
So to summarize, Kennedy used bigoted assumptions and assertions to connect Hamas and the Oct. 7 attacks to the Democratic Party. THAT was his goal and was likely successful for his constituents, the MAGA loons.
Kennedy clearly had a script to follow, and he was going to follow that script no matter what she said. In his script she equivocated about her support for Hamas and it wasn’t his fault she didn’t say her lines right.
Dunno, but missing the name of one of the two major party’s candidate for President of the US seems like the kind of thing that ought definitely to be caught in inspecting the electronic ballot before it got sent out.
Did they leave the website open so people could vote while they where correcting this ‘error’?
Any ballots that where received during that error should be nulled out and those folks allowed to vote again. A BIG notice should go on that website explaining the screw up.
And, if challenged in court by Dems, the SCOTUS rejecting it 6-3 because there’s nothing in the Constitution that says states must list all candidates for office on their ballots.
I’d say close to 100%. Trump is going to win Montana easily even without shenanigans (he’s +15% in recent polling), and altering the ballot in such a ham handed way was guaranteed to get noticed and investigated. So its a high risk with minimal reward. My guess is that everyone thought that someone else was going to check it and nobody did.
This could go in any number of threads, but I felt it was worth sharing.
Poker game. Six men, two of whom are public school teachers. We’re not talking politics, but one of the teachers makes a joke about how stressful it is to be gender-transitioning students every single day. We all laugh at the reference to Trump’s idiotic claim.
Then, one of the non-teachers says, “But I did hear that one school in [posh western Chicago suburb] had so many kids identifying as cats that they had to put litter boxes in the classrooms.”
He wasn’t being ironic or facetious – he actually thought it was true. The rest of us quickly set him straight.
When I mentioned this incident to my wife, she said, “Oh yeah, my hair stylist told me the same thing.” And she (my wife) also thought it was true!
GOP politicians still occasionally trot out this bullshit, despite its widespread debunking. So here’s a wholehearted FUCK YOU to the party that invented and continues to peddle this story because they know it’s just believable enough to convince people that “Woke” is out of control and their own schools will soon have litter boxes if the Democrat party isn’t stopped.
Sometimes, telling these people the real reason you might find a bin full of kitty litter in a school classroom will make them hush. Other times, you’ll just get a lecture on what happens when we don’t let God into our schools.
I always tell such people that it saddens me to see how weak their faith is, that they think God can be “taken out” of anywhere and that belief in Him can only be instilled by coercion. How little they must think of the God they worship! And what poor ambassadors for Jesus these angry, insecure autocrats are…
I have a colleague who earlier this summer insisted that a friend they knew with kids in a local school told them that the school was providing litter boxes.
They could not be convinced that they were wrong, or that their friend lied to them. They left it at “I’ll ask them if they’re willing to come forward and give you the info firsthand, but I won’t tell you any more details so I don’t break expectations of privacy.”
People are idiots in general. We lie. We get invested in obvious falsehoods and can’t let go. We tend to believe and repeat things that give us power or social capital or attention.
The Republican party is overwhelmingly made up of people who intentionally take advantage of this aspect of human nature, and those who have succumbed to this aspect of their own nature.
It’s a classic urban legend. People hear the story, believe it’s true, and then (consciously or unconsciously) boost its credibility by making it about friends or relatives to whom it’s actually happening.
Decades ago these urban legends were about cacti full of tarantulas, but the GOP has succeeded in weaponizing them.
