All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[WestPhillyPunisher]

White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications and Director of Social Media posts cartoon and message on FB attacking the nation’s leading infectious disease expert for telling the truth about this deadly pandemic.

You’d think these clowns had better things to do with their time. Then, I remembered who they worked for, so I rolled my eyes and said: “Never mind!”

[Mister Mets]

You really need to google this before you say **** like this.

I assure you that I've googled the topic.

The top results are mainly about the controversy, including the detail that as of 2016, 90% of Native Americans were not offended by the name.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local...f9a_story.html

If I check out "redskins graffiti" to see if there's a story of anyone using it as a slur that way, the main results are a story about someone in a high school spray-painting a message calling for the name to be changed.

https://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news...-with-graffiti

I am not getting any reports of redskin used as a pejorative or a racial slur.

Just. Asking. Questions.

Asking questions seems like a good thing to do in a political forum.

Even a well-informed person isn't going to know or recall as much as everyone in the group out together.

It's not hard to understand, saying things that you know to be wrong and getting people all worked up to argue with you when you have zero intention of debating in good faith is its own kind of power trip if you think about it. It's like the internet equivalent of stop hitting yourself.

In this case, the question was asked in good faith.

If it's something known to be wrong, it should be pretty easy to come up with a counterexample (unless you suspect that I've done an inordinate amount of research and am aware of really obscure counterexamples; I'm not.)

I'm convinced Republicans aren't entirely serious when they ask questions like this, I think it's some kind of troll I don't understand.

If we're judging Republicans and Democrats by their responses to these questions, we could look at how the "sides" are communicating here. Democrats (or those who lean to the left) have gone with the least generous interpretation of a question, without making the objection clear.

For example, this post...

Dude. Just don’t.

Is he bothered by the hint of an objection to a team changing their name? Does he think it was the wrong framing? Is it both?

He hasn't communicated what he thought the problem was.

[The Cool Thatguy]

I heard Roger Stone might write a book.

If he did, it would be all about how innocent Trump is, and how Russia totally didn't help in the election.

[Panfoot]

So if you find nothing wrong with the Redskins, what if there was a team named the Washington Negros? Or maybe the San Francisco Chinamen? Getting it now?

[Starter Set]

So if you find nothing wrong with the Redskins, what if there was a team named the Washington Negros? Or maybe the San Francisco Chinamen? Getting it now?

So, should we call the NY Giants the "NY people with growth disorder" or is that still too offensive?

[The Cool Thatguy]

So, should we call the NY Giants the "NY people with growth disorder" or is that still too offensive?

I don't recall giants ever being a slur, used on connection with systemic genocide. What, was Loki your school teacher?

[Tami]

WASHINGTON (AP) — A new White House-backed ad campaign aims to encourage people who are unemployed or unhappy in their jobs or careers to go out and “find something new.”

[shooshoomanjoe]

So, should we call the NY Giants the "NY people with growth disorder" or is that still too offensive?

This is literally the argument the far right are making on social media.

[The Cool Thatguy]

WASHINGTON (AP) — A new White House-backed ad campaign aims to encourage people who are unemployed or unhappy in their jobs or careers to go out and “find something new.”

...that's like telling people with depression to smile more

[mathew101281]

I don’t believe Covid is some kind of biology attack, but one of my biggest concerns is that some of the enemies of the United States are looking at the reaction to Covid and saying “they aren’t wired to deal with this kind of thing at all.” It’s essentially turning our constitutional rights against us. Exercising The right to protest and the right to assemble have now become ways of spreading death, large segments of the population don’t trust their government (and doctors) enough to protect themselves. Lord help us if their was an actual biological weapon attack.

[PwrdOn]

Do you really think those kind of changes will happen instantly? The decision is less than a week old. I don't know what will happen in the end, but whatever it is will probably take a little time. At least now the tribes in Oklahoma have some cards to play in any negotiations. What finally comes out of this is up in the air currently.

You and I both know that nothing will come out of this. The tribes will get some token concessions but fundamentally they will remain as they have always been, shut out from any kind of real political or economic power. And you know, the whites never had any qualms about seizing native land illegally overnight, most of them even got there, shall we say, sooner.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2014, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” published a profile on Russell Pearce, the man who sponsored Arizona’s SB1070 law who was recalled for office after repeatedly making inflammatory racist accusations about illegal immigrants, “accidentally” sent out Neo-Nazi fliers in the mail, and who openly associated with militia groups who patrolled the border in their spare time. One such close ally of Pearce was J.T. Ready, a potential protégé of his who just so happened to also be a Neo-Nazi who ended up mass-murdering his girlfriend and her family. At that point, Pearce tried lying his ass off and pretending he didn’t know who Ready was, but no one was buying it. The fact that Pearce was also a Birther who claimed President Obama was “waging jihad” against Arizona seems like an afterthought to his other dickery. Last we hard, Russell Pearce was working in talk radio in Arizona while serving as a member of the state GOP, when on air, he made a policy suggestion that women who receive government assistance should be sterilized. And, the idea that maybe eugenics is a solution to the poor was not taken kindly, and Pearce was forced to resign from any party position, going forward.


In 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018, and 2019, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” published profiles of the U.S. Senator from Florida, Marco Rubio, who was one of the favorites going in to the 2016 GOP presidential primary to win the nomination. This in spite of his embarrassing 2013 State of the Union rebuttal where mid-speech, he lurched off-camera to grab a teeny-tiny bottle of water. This attempt at seeking the highest office in the nation also occurred even though Rubio was found to have lied about his parents' heroic flight from Castro's Cuba (they emigrated years before the revolution). Rubio, once considered a "moderate" Republican also fled from his previous positions on immigration and the environment, respectively, moving to become a climate change denier on the former, and on the latter, defended Arizona's SB 1070 law while criticizing the DREAM Act.

And for a social moderate, it's interesting that Rubio not only has argued against same-sex marriage, but also gay adoption, while showing support for "religious freedom" laws and accusing those critical of his stance on those issues of being intolerant of HIS beliefs. Rubio also has accused President Obama of being a socialist, voted for the 2013 Government Shutdown (and voted against re-opening government when the time came), was among the "47 Traitors" in the U.S. Senate who tried o meddle in negotiations with Iran, violating the Logan Act, and accused Sec. of State John Kerry and the Obama administration of "letting ISIS win to appease Iran" during a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2015 (which is stupid, because ISIS followers supposedly are followers of radicalized Sunni Islam, and Iran's citizenry, by and large, are Shia Muslims). On abortion, Marco Rubio leans hard right, and in live interviews has claimed that there’s an entire “abortion industry” that profits off of performing the procedure, and that Planned Parenthood does so to turn profits. He isn’t try and retroactively re-write history for partisan purposes, saying 9/11 happened on the Clinton’s administration’s watch (ignoring that it was 9 months into the Bush administration), and claimed that the Benghazi hearings had “proven Hillary Clinton was a liar” which, they did nothing of the sort. During his failed attempt to get the 2016 GOP nomination, Marco Rubio had a stretch of almost a year and a half where he was derelict of duty as a Senator, missing 35% of the votes in Washington, D.C. And it’s not like that failed campaign did any favors to his image, as he was exposed as “Marcobot” by Chris Christie, who noted how Rubio just recites the same few canned lines in debates, before in the waning days of his campaign, Rubio using the phrase, “You know what they say about a guy with tiny hands?” to insinuate that Donald Trump had a tiny penis. Because THAT’S healthy discourse for American politics (and we really needed to hear Trump use a later debate to relitigate his penis size).

This waste of a U.S. Senate seat got a second term in 2016 after breaking his promise to not run for re-election if he didn’t win the presidency, running and winning again in Florida against Democrat Patrick Murphy. And, the man who Donald Trump mocked and called “Little Marco” went back to work doing things like approving every single member of his Cabinet of Horrors. Every. Single. One. And he’s gone out of his way to lie to the citizens of Florida about how negatively impacted they will be from the proposed version of Trumpcare in the Senate. He’s been more concerned about who’s giving information to the press about the Trump administration trying to cover up their ties to Russia than the cover-up itself. And that last part is even more remarkable, because Rubio has acknowledged that during the 2016 GOP Primary, he got hacked by the Russians, too.

Rubio defies medical science with how he can walk upright without the presence of a spine. In this update, we have to discuss the fallout from the shooting in Parkland, Florida. See, when CNN wanted to host a town hall to have the families of the victims, survivors of the shooting, and other citizens from the community to create a productive discussion about how to create solutions to the problem of gun violence in our country, particularly in a big uptick in shootings in schools… for whatever reason, Marcobot and his tendency to not be able to improvise and only have tree sound bites to repeat thought he was the guy to represent gun rights in the room full of people who were demanding action.

And boy, did he embarrass himself again. Between having the father of one of the victims tell him he was “pathetically weak”, he also rhetorically asked the audience who really would want gun control and was dumbfounded when almost every hand in the room went up, and was booed after Cameron Kasky called on him to stop accepting political donations from the NRA and he refused. His only real concession was that he would be willing to raise the age to purchase firearms from 18 to 21. In the days that followed, fellow survivor Sarah Chadwick posted on Twitter:

”We should change the names of AR-15s to ‘Marco Rubio’ because they are so easy to buy.”

And, like the invertebrate he is, Marco Rubio already flipped on his support of raising the age requirement within a few weeks of that town hall, and went on to criticize their organization of “The March for Our Lives”, because how dare they exercise their First Amendment rights to protest getting shot at.

Rubio has continued to make himself look like an idiot, only hours before the Capital Gazette shooting in Annapolis, he managed to put his foot in his mouth, and complain about how he felt the media was responsible for “biased reporting” that left “a lack of trust” in creating an environment where Americans can’t even agree of facts. He got called out for participating on the attacks on the media spearheaded by the Trump GOP, and that the sort of thinking he chose to promote was a motivating factor for the shooter.

[worstblogever]

In the past two years, we’ve seen Rubio continue to vote for every Trump nominee, provide empty words and no action as immigrant children continue to be separated from their parents and locked in inhuman conditions, and as a revolution broke out in Venezuela, gave some not-so-sutbtle hints on Twitter that he’d like for a violent coup to end up in the death of dictator Nicolas Maduro.

• October 21st, 2019: Marco Rubio chastises Kurdish citizens who were protesting are insulting Americans for abandoning them to the mercies of Turkish forces. THE NERVE OF THOSE PEOPLE, RIGHT? NOT JUST ACCEPTING WE WERE LEAVING THEM TO BE VICTIMS OF GENOCIDE.
• January 31st, 2020: Sen. Rubio votes against witnesses being allowed in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, effectively making it a “trial”.
• February 5th, 2020: Marco Rubio votes against the impeachment of Donald Trump, in spite of the mountain of evidence showing that he solicited foreign assistance in the 2020 elections.
• February 25th, 2020: Rubio votes for the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, an insane piece of anti-choice legislation that would ask abortion providers to try to admit aborted fetuses to a hospital if they were “alive” after the procedure, which is medically impossible given the age that abortions can be performed at.
• March 23rd, 2020: Sen. Rubio defends Donald Trump and Republicans who are trying to rename Coronavirus “Wuhan Virus” or “Kung Flu” or other racist nicknames.
• March 29th, 2020: Rubio posts video on Twitter from himself driving, chastising the media for reporting that the U.S. surpassed China in total number of Covid-19 infections, and intimated they were gleeful about the rising death toll.

Just a reminder, Marco Rubio is not up for re-election until 2022, unless he’s taken out by a scandal, or resigns to focus on a 2020 presidential campaign.

[The Cool Thatguy]

I don’t believe Covid is some kind of biology attack, but one of my biggest concerns is that some of the enemies of the United States are looking at the reaction to Covid and saying “they aren’t wired to deal with this kind of thing at all.” It’s essentially turning our constitutional rights against us. Exercising The right to protest and the right to assemble have now become ways of spreading death, large segments of the population don’t trust their government (and doctors) enough to protect themselves. Lord help us if their was an actual biological weapon attack.

We wouldn't be so screwed up right now if it weren't for an idiot president encouraging the worst of us

[Kirby101]

Here you go Mets, took me a minute of Googling to find it refers to scalped Native Americans. Please feel free to continue to question why the name is offensive.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politic...n-name-update/