We are in dangerous times .... 70% of the republican members of the House in Jan. 2021 voted ....

[Botany]

.... to overturn the will of American voters and make Trump a dictator and to that end a certain
% of them gave tours of the US Capitol so within a day or two they could use violence to stop the
Constitutionally mandated transfer of power to the winner of the Presidential election.

Being a Republican and being a good American is now an antithetical act. It got to be 100 degrees
F here yesterday and we lost electric power so I had on a local radio station for information about the
outage and the local and national talk shows were nothing short of outright sedition. We have God
only knows how many Americans listening to those lie based brain toxins everyday. One show
started off talking about how "we" have to fight back against President Biden's illegally occupying
the White House.

BTW many years ago in N.W. PA in a very middle class neighborhood our next door neighbor was the
county D.A. and his brother, Ray Shafer was the Governor of the state. You would never have met
a better man and he was republican too.

sorry to

[Walleye]

1. I remember Gov Shafer as a good guy.Liberal Republican.Unheard of now

[Botany]

5. It was a different time but everybody saw him in the neighborhood and yelled "Hey Governor" ....

... @ him, he loved to play ball with the us kids, and when he was around for family
business (weddings, births, deaths, or the death of a neighbor's son in Vietnam)
everybody gave him "his space." And for some reason he liked to hang out with a
geeky little kid aka me as I fished in the lake behind our homes.

BTW later on I looked up stuff on Ray and he:

Thought Vietnam was a mistake .... navy combat vet WW II (kept it quite)
Supported Unions
Supported Education
Supported Civil Rights
Supported the environment
Headed a study the Nixon asked him to and said Marijuana really wasn't a problem
Really big into infrastructure
Was a good guy. I would see him along with family members and neighbors on our back porch
laughing and enjoying "the simple things"

[Walleye]

6. That's pretty cool. I know I had a good impression of him at the time. Thanks for the story

[Botany]

7. Long before everybody had their cell phone cameras, the media left him alone when he was with ...

... family and friends, and nobody bothered him (I'm pretty sure the large gentleman who dressed nice
who was with him @ times was a state cop). I didn't know it at the time but Ray was very smart, had a
degree from Allegheny and J.D. from Yale, was an officer in the Navy in WW II and was awarded the bronze
star and a purple heart. And he was a liberal too.

Sadly that area of PA has become home to toxic right wing assholes. I blame hate talk radio for much of that.

Ray was once what a lot of Republicans were but not any more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_P._Shafer

[Walleye]

8. I think the last good Republican was Delaware's Mike Castle

I wouldn’t call him a liberal but he was very much a moderate and very well liked, he had been governor for eight years and our US representative many years after that. In 2010 Sean Hannity and the right wing machine decided they could run Christine O’Donnell, witch, for senator. It was really Castle’s turn, that’s the way we do things here. We weren’t really used to primaries, and the Republicans in the state fully expected Castle to be the nominee. Instead they organized enough right wingers downstate for O’Donnell to win the primary. Really stupid. Castle had won 11 statewide elections. Our current Senator Chris Coons would never have beat Castle, I don’t think. I’m convinced the Republican Party wants to destroy the United States

[Botany]

9. "I'm convinced the Republican Party wants to destroy the United States." Or at least representative

.... democracy based on eligible and registered voters voting and having their votes counted. Because
the population dynamics of America dooms them to be an ever shrinking minority as long as they will
not do what the American people want done. Our 50 senators represent something like 40 million or is
it 80 million more people then their 50 senators. McConnell and others are well aware of what they
are doing and have done in order to keep as much control as they have aka pack the courts, voter IDs,
voter purges, eliminate chances to and places to vote, $$$ & media, and those fucking voting machines.

[Emile]

2. The Republicans who voted to overturn election results are traitors!

At the very least, they should be kicked out of government!

[Initech]

3. Fox News and MAGA preachers are leading this country off a cliff.

Their embrace of Viktor Orban's white supremacist ideals is proof of that.

[Frasier Balzov]

4. You now have a glimpse of what has been slowly poisoning the body politic.

Terrestrial AM broadcast radio. Every license of those air polluters needs to be challenged at renewal time.