Boner Candidate #1: THE PEOPLE HAVE SPOKEN
The newly elected chair of the Republican Party in the county that includes the Texas Capitol spent most of election night tweeting about former Gov. Rick Perry’s sexual orientation and former President Bill Clinton’s penis, and insisting that members of the Bush family should be in jail. He also found time to call Hillary Clinton an “angry bull dyke” and accuse his county vice chair of betraying the values of the Republican Party. “The people have spoken,” Robert Morrow, who won the helm of the Travis County GOP with 54 percent of the vote, told The Texas Tribune. “My friends and neighbors and political supporters — they wanted Robert Morrow.” Morrow’s election as Republican chair of the fifth-largest county in Texas left several members of the Travis County GOP, including vice chair Matt Mackowiak, apoplectic. Mackowiak, a Republican strategist, immediately announced over social media that he would do everything in his power to remove Morrow from office. “We will explore every single option that exists, whether it be persuading him to resign, trying to force him to resign, constraining his power, removing his ability to spend money or resisting any attempt for him to access data or our social media account,” Mackowiak told the Tribune. “I’m treating this as a coup and as a hostile takeover.” “Tell them they can go fuck themselves,” Morrow told the Tribune.
Boner Candidate #2: LET THEM DRINK LEAD.
The intellectual leader of the tea party movement in the Senate is secretly holding up a bill to help the residents of Flint, Michigan, who have been poisoned by their own water supply. As Republican presidential hopefuls gather in Detroit for a critical post-Super Tuesday debate, Sen. Mike Lee is stalling plans to alleviate the nearby town’s drinking water crisis—a disaster that has a disproportionate and devastating impact on the poor and the young. Lee is using a Senate tactic used to gum up the works known as a “hold,” which is generally kept secret so the lawmaker can remain anonymous. But two senior Senate sources confirmed to The Daily Beast that Lee is behind the maneuver to stall an utterly uncontroversial provision. Privately the Utah Republican has relied on three reasons to justify his opposition to the legislation, all of which are procedural or philosophical. Lee doesn’t like that the proposal is not being put through the ordinary and time-consuming gantlet of Senate procedures known as “regular order”; has objections on how money from the stimulus is being repurposed for water infrastructure; and is concerned about the federal government getting involved in what he views as a local issue. His action—or inaction—comes as lawmakers in the Senate are scrambling to advance urgent legislation that would make hundreds of millions in grants and loans available to Flint, which in January declared a state of emergency after thousands of its residents were exposed to toxic levels of lead. The initiative, which senators want to add to a larger energy policy bill, ultimately doesn’t cost any new government funds, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, since the proposal is paid for with money redirected from a subsidy for the automotive industry.
Boner Candidate #3: ROBO CALLS FROM A WHITE SUPREMACIST
Utahns with a home phone may receive a recorded call from a white nationalist supporting Donald Trump and slamming Mitt Romney. William Johnson, who leads the American Freedom Party, paid about $6,000 for the calls that are expected to hit Utah homes Thursday and Friday, between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. He did so in reaction to Romney’s highly critical speech calling Trump a “fraud” and a “phony.” “Mitt Romney said a lot of bad things,” Johnson said. “Trump is a nationalist. Trump is a populist, and the mean-spirited Republicans are battling that. I had to battle back.” Johnson provided The Salt Lake Tribune with a copy of the call’s script, which includes: “The white race is being replaced by other peoples in America and in all white countries. Donald Trump stands strong as a nationalist. Mitt Romney and his establishment conservatives pretend they don’t care.” Johnson has produced similar robocalls in Iowa, New Hampshire, Minnesota and Vermont, according to NBCNews. Part of Romney’s critique of Trump is that the celebrity billionaire hasn’t denounced racists, including a former leader of the KKK, in a widely seen CNN interview. In his speech in Salt Lake City on Thursday, Romney warned the “exchange on the Ku Klux Klan will play a hundred thousand times on cable and who knows how many million times on social media.” He went on to say that Trump “creates scapegoats of Muslims and Mexican immigrants, he calls for the use of torture and for killing the innocent children and family members of terrorists.”
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