Walter Einenkel

In November, former Marine Lucas Kunce ran a solid grassroots campaign for U.S. Senate that surprised many but came up short in the Democratic primary after Trudy Busch Valentine entered into the race late.

Kunce is not letting the momentum he generated over the past year ebb and has once again jumped in early, releasing a campaign ad for the upcoming 2024 U.S. Senate race in Missouri on Friday. This would be for Sen.

This past week Americans experienced something that has not happened for 100 years: The House of Representatives took more than a couple of days—and no fewer than 14 votes—to agree upon a speaker. It has been something of a fiasco for the Republican Party because there is no ideological division here.

The Republican Party is in disarray. It isn’t an ideological battle going on as the leadership old and new have been on the same page for some time about not having any policy ideas. The main difference between what is called the “Freedom Caucus” and yesteryear’s establishment Republican Party leadership is that the Freedom Caucus has forced all conservatives to give up the false pretense that they ever had any policy ideas to begin with.

As we come to the end of 2022, we remember the people who have moved through the door of life and into our collective memories. Musicians, composers, and singers are among the many groups of people that deserve a moment of remembrance as they frequently put into feeling what we cannot express simply through words or pictures or hugs.

Below I will list some of the names of musicians who passed away in 2022.

On Thursday, a state court in Texas threw out a lawsuit brought against abortion provider Dr. Alan Braid. The San Antonio doctor had been sued under Texas’ near-total abortion ban law, Senate Bill 8. Dr. Braid admitted to defying the law just days after it took effect. Dr. Braid was not clandestine about his actions, penning an opinion piece that was promptly published in The Washington Post, titled “Why I violated Texas’s extreme abortion ban.

On Tuesday, the Washington, D.C., police and other law enforcement connected to defending the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, received Congressional gold medals in a ceremony. This included the family of officer Brian Sicknick, who died as a result of the events of Jan. 6. At the ceremony were the top leaders of both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party: Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

A conservative North Georgia talk show host who, like most conservatives, rails against election fraud, has allegedly voted illegally … nine times. He’s also a candidate for the state House. How did he allegedly break the law and commit Republican-only election fraud?

Well, the Georgia attorney general’s office says Brian K. Pritchard voted while “serving a felony sentence in a $33,000 forgery and theft case.

On Monday, following delay after delay, the MAGA-controlled Cochise County, Arizona, board of elections missed its deadline to certify 47,000-plus (mostly conservative) votes. The move was seen by most as pure political theater from a deep-red county which has swallowed the Big Lie election denialism hook, line, and sinker. Like all political theater, this will cost taxpayers money.

On Monday, Donald Trump’s former senior adviser and lie machine Kellyanne Conway met with the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. It was unclear if she was compelled to meet with the committee or just dropped in after being asked to.

Arizona Republicans are facing the same bitter pill the rest of the MAGA world is facing right now: They are wildly unpopular, and most people do not like what they are selling. If they were a small business that sold widgets, they would be going out of business. The Democratic Party had one of the most successful midterm election results of the modern era, at a time when it seemed very hard for Republicans not to win.

Happy holidays! With the advent of higher digital resolutions and more affordable access to digital editing technology, photography has become one of the most degraded and the most elevated artistic places for creativity. One of the great leaps in digital technology has been the ability to restore old photography. Being able to clean up scratched or eroded negatives or prints, ripped memories in picture books has never been easier.

Less than a week before Election Day, South Dakota state Senate candidate Joel Matthew Koskan was charged with child abuse. Court documents allege the GOP candidate groomed his adopted daughter, controlled her, and ultimately sexually assaulted her over a period of 6 years. The probable cause statement reads like a manual of sexual grooming for a child molester.

On Nov. 9, Columbus, Ohio’s public health officials released a statement that they were investigating 4 cases of measles at a child care facility. According to WBNS10, one of the children ended up in intensive care. Thankfully, that child had been released home. All four cases were in unvaccinated children with no history of traveling out of the United States.

Guess who may have made up to $640 million from ‘outside income’ while in the White House? It has been less than 24 hours since the Republican Party became the official majority party in the coming term. And while this majority is slim and restricts their abilities, while leaving open the possibilities of some legislative actions for Democrats to continue pursuing, what it does allow them to do is investigate stuff using congressional committee oversight powers.

While Twitter continues its spiral into the billionaire black hole that is Elon Musk’s ego, some members of the Twitter community continue to try and use the platform to spread information about and awareness of more important things going on in our world. Actor Rainn Wilson, best known for his portrayal of Dwight in the American sitcom version of The Office, did just that.

Wilson has a very large Twitter following, numbering in the millions.

The MAGA world is shaken. The traditional media is shaken. The right wing-o-sphere is shaken. After believing a “red tsunami” was coming to wash away the Democratic Party and usher in a red wave of fascists on Nov. 8, centrists and conservatives everywhere are shaken. We were less shaken. 

It is usually bad form to gloat over another person’s loss.

When pretend not-Trumper Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia decided to take a page from Ron DeSantis’ bigotry playbook and open up an email hotline to expose school teachers “indoctrinating” children with critical race theory (CRT), everyone around these parts knew it was a terrible joke.

As we approach the Nov. 8 midterm elections, races across the country seem to be heating up. Whether they’re truly heating up or the traditional media is making it sound like things are heating up is debatable. However, like most elections, the No. 1 thing either political party can do at this point is convince its registered members to vote. That’s the whole game, in a nutshell.

The right-wing-o-sphere has spent most of the day figuring out the angle on a (very likely) right-wing MAGA Big Lie-believer who attacked and seriously injured House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s 82-year-old husband Paul Pelosi with a hammer. The attack took place early Friday morning after the man broke into the Pelosi home in San Francisco, California. According to reports, Mr. Pelosi was able to contact police during the ordeal and the suspect is now in custody.

On Wednesday, hidden under the fog of traditional media outlets worrying about Democratic candidate John Fetterman’s post-stroke recovery, while accepting Mehmet Oz’s career of quackery, President Biden’s Department of Justice made a very important announcement. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland formally codified the FBI policy banning the use of subpoenas, search warrants, and other legal measures against news journalists in most circumstances.

Pennsylvania Senate candidates John Fetterman and Mehmet Oz faced off in their one and only debate Tuesday night. After a rough start where Fetterman’s lack of experience in being a fast-talking fraud doctor was in contrast to his fast-talking hack doctor opponent, he began righting the ship. In a nice exchange where Mehmet Oz side-stepped a question about how most doctors consider Dr.

Democratic Rep. Katie Porter of California has done the never-ending yeoman’s work of explaining how our country’s economic system is fraught with inequality, corruption, and a ferocious lack of accountability.

Jerry Falwell Jr.’s fall from grace was, like everything else over the last five or so years, predictably trite. The son of Jerry Falwell Sr., Junior stepped into his father’s camel-sized shoes and used his father’s political connections to promote the very lucrative (and tax exempt) morality of evangelical Christianity. At the peak of his powers, with Donald Trump by his side, Falwell Jr.

Friday brought us a debate between Sen. Raphael Warnock and Trump-supported domestic abuser, conservative Christian family values hypocrite Herschel Walker. It has been a roller coaster ride. There will likely be volumes written about every bizarre half-coherent statement made by Walker but we are going to focus on just one.

And this one fun moment was when Sen.

If you didn’t know it already, Thursday’s Jan. 6 committee hearing included a unanimous vote to subpoena Donald Trump to testify and supply documentation in service of the committee’s ongoing investigation into the events that led up to the assault on the Capitol grounds in Washington, D.C., in 2021.

So where were we? Oh, right. On Monday, The Daily Beast’s Roger Sollenberger reported on super-born-again Christian and Republican Georgia Senate nominee Herschel Walker paying for a woman’s abortion back in 2009. This was problematic, as Walker has gone on the record saying he is against all abortions with no exceptions—including rape, incest, and health of the pregnant person.

Since he was tapped by the world’s most self-absorbed rich kid Donald Trump to run for Senate in Georgia, Herschel Walker has been nothing if not the worst candidate in the world. On every issue, Walker is a failure. He is a clearly incompetent public figure, lacking in decency and in the self-reflection needed to lead people beyond his very spotted past. That past includes secret children and very frightening moments of domestic violence.

When news broke that Republican House candidate J.R. Majewski’s self-proclaimed military record was filled with what right-wing viral YouTube clips would call “stolen valor,” it perfectly illustrated the hypocrisy of faketriots like Donald Trump and similar MAGA chickenhawks.

A very distressing report released Monday revealed that 47 Alameda County Sheriff’s deputies were removed from service on Friday, Sept. 23. Since the agency has roughly 1,000 active officers, this means that nearly 5% of the active police force suddenly did not have law enforcement powers. The former officers’ firearms and badges were taken from them.