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

[Ozymandias]

I didn't think Putin left enough air for the opposition to have to worry about the actual election.

Yeltsin made the job easy for him, banning the CPSU from the beginning. And even against its offspring, they both had to rig the elections for a whole decade. All this with the acquiescence of the west. By the time the US and its allies started wondering if they wanted Putin at the helm of Russia, there was no one left to oppose him. So yes, nowadays Russians can vote whatever they want, just as Americans can vote whatever they want, with a slight difference; the facade of democracy can be maintained on the US, because there are two "options", while in Russian you only have one. Now, if Medvedev had a fake kerfuffle with Putin, and founded "another" party promising completely different policies, but that would end doing the same... then the charade would be good.

[CaptainEurope]

I thought that chicken eggs we buy from the market are unfertilized?

Child! Let me tell you about the time I wanted to make a marble cake. Cracked an egg, found feathers and a beak. I help up every single egg to a lamp for YEARS after that.

[CaptainEurope]

I don't think she eats humans.

Allegedly.

[Catlady in training]

I have never seen an Oliver Stone Movie so I have no idea what you are talking about.

He did a russia sponsored movie called Ukraine on Fire that russian trolls like to mention as proof that Ukraine is in the wrong.

Of course I have the link, but it's quite hardcore. I don't know if it even can be posted here. I also don't know it the New York Post can be considered MSM, which is like the only thing accepted by MSM consumers.

If you want hardcore, there was an intercepted phonecall between russian soldier and his mother when he described how they torture prisoners. I warn everyone though, it is very graphic, I had trouble falling asleep after I read it:
https://metro.co.uk/2022/05/10/russi...hods-16618041/

[mortari]

Allegedly.

and this would only work if sea turtles are equal to humans

[ChrisIII]

Should Marvel and Star Wars fans be worried about the proposed changes to Disney's copyright protection? I'm not sure the bill will pass though.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, as well as 2019, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day”posted profiles of the current U.S. House Representative for Kansas’ 3rd District, Kevin Yoder, who we noted was a part of the Republican delegation that visited Israel in August of 2012 that got blitzed out of their minds on liquor, and in the ultimate combination of being high on Judeo-Christian faith and wasted on Jaegermeister from that huge bar tab on taxpayers dime… went skinny-dipping in the Sea of Galilee. While on official business for our government. He was re-elected in spite of this admission, because he only faced a Libertarian candidate in 2012, and has gone on to vote against the Farm Bill (despite serving a district in a state with a lot of farms), and to hide from reporters for weeks after he snuck an amendment onto a budget bill can to chip away at Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform, feeling that Wall Street banks should be allowed the “freedom” to do everything stupid that caused the 2007 Great Recession all over again. (His biggest campaign contributors, of course, are Wall Street banks.) Yoder, voted by Washington media as “one of the biggest party animals in Congress”, also has the hypocrisy of voting against disaster relief for Hurricane Sandy victims, but asking for tornado relief whenever one hits his district, voted to defund Planned Parenthood in 2011, but maintain government funding towards NASCAR sponsorships, and did not just vote for the 2013 Government Shutdown, but voted against e-opening the government when the time came. He is also not above hyperventilating about the GOP outrage of the moment, including his call for a travel ban to Africa during the 2014 Ebola Virus outbreak in spite of the advice of all medical experts, and voting for bills like the “No More Solyndras Act”, the “Stop the War on Coal Act”, and the “Stop the Targeting of Political Beliefs by the IRS Act”. He has underhandedly worked to subvert Dodd-Frank legislation, even voted against the bipartisan-supported Farm Bill (which Kansas tends to like, what with the farms that are famously in Kansas) and didn't just vote against the Planned Parenthood videos, he sent an open letter to House Speaker John Boehner where he described the selectively edited, fraudulent “sting” videos created by the Center for Medical Progress and feigned outrage over their supposed practices that "harvest and sell baby organs", and graphically describing "innocent children, ripped from their mother's womb and their skulls crushed". Even though, y'know, that wasn't based in reality. With a Blue Wave election looming in 2018, Kevin Yoder started skipping town halls and practically hiding from his own constituents, who took notice that he was only taking meetings with big banks and payday loan executives or say, Ivanka Trump. Kansas' 3rd Congressional District had a +4 Republican lean, but that wasn’t enough to save Yoder from having a boot placed firmly in his arse in 2018, as he ended up losing to new Congresswoman Sharice Davids by almost ten full percentage points, even with that advantage. Now that he has free time, that he might, as a private citizen, make himself happy by returning to the Holy Land to go skinny-dipping again.



Thom Tillis

On this date in both 2020, as well as 2021, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” first profiled the U.S. Senator from North Carolina, Thom Tillis, who first got his Senate seat back in the 2014 elections. Prior to heading to Washington, D.C., Tillis served in the North Carolina House of Representatives from 2007-2014. Now, we don’t want to just focus on Tillis’ career in our nation’s capital in this profile, and point out that North Carolina’s state government not-coincidentally went full-on Looney Tunes right around the point where the Tea Party began influencing the GOP and putting partisan tools like Tillis into seats of power. Tillis was allowed to run for re-election unopposed in 2008, 2010, and 2012. And from his role as House Speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives, the entire state legislature got gerrymandered into a false majority, and North Carolina Republicans started passing laws like stricter Voter ID bills (while Tillis admitted there was not statistical evidence of fraud to justify the need for it) and votes to cut the number of early voting days (aimed at suppressing the vote and maintaining that false majority further that were all turned away by appeals courts), an amendment to the state Constitution to ban same sex marriage (and he hasn’t changed his position on same sex marriage even after the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling), the notorious “Motorcycle Safety Abortion Bill” (where upon a bill requiring helmets for motorcyclists was amended to become one of the harshest anti-choice measures in all the country).

Perhaps his most shocking moment as a state legislator was in 2011, when he gave his thoughts on using a “divide and conquer” strategy to combat people who receive government assistance:

"At some point, we'll have to say, 'First kid, we'll give you a pass. Second, third or fourth kid, you're on your own. What we have to do is find a way to divide and conquer the people who are on assistance. We have to show respect for that woman who has cerebral palsy and had no choice in her condition that needs help and we should help.
And we need to get those folks to look down at those people who choose to get into a position that makes them dependent on the government and say at some point, 'You're on your own. We may end up taking care of those babies but we're not going to take care of you.”

Tillis never apologized for those remarks, instead claiming he “misspoke” a bit, and then going on to pledge his support for welfare drug testing (which repeatedly has proven not just a failed policy, but courts rule it an unconstitutional one).


After stacking the deck for himself with the laws he pushed for passage as a legislator to suppress the vote in his favor in the years prior, Thom Tillis did made his run for Senate in 2014, employing a data firm you may have heard of that year called Cambridge Analytica, who may have already used the data from a Facebook primary breach to help him win office with a meager 48.2% over Democratic Senator Kay Hagan, the smallest winning percentage total for a Senator from North Carolina in an election, ever. We’ll note Tillis spent the months leading up to the election fear-mongering about the spread of the Ebola virus into the United States, saying that not enough was being done by the Obama administration to stop travel from Africa.

Tillis, since winning office in 2014, somehow he has dug in and become even more conservative, not just maintaining his Personhood stance on abortion, He drafted legislation that would overturn the Affordable Care Act with the promise of still protecting pre-existing conditions, but had to pull it out of embarrassment that it was so poorly written it would just strip protections from almost everyone with them. He has cravenly caved in support of Donald Trump’s immigration policies like the spineless toad he is, for fear he would lose a primary election in 2020.

He denies the existence of climate change, calling it “not a fact” and was the first U.S. Senator to write to Donald Trump asking him to pull out of the Paris Climate Accords. On guns, Tillis is extreme enough to have an “A+” rating from the NRA, probably because he was willing to even vote against a bill that would have prevented anyone on a terror watch list from purchasing a firearm.

[Mister Mets]

Should Marvel and Star Wars fans be worried about the proposed changes to Disney's copyright protection? I'm not sure the bill will pass though.

From the fans perspective, modern copyright isn't a good thing. If Star Wars was public domain, anyone could make a Star Wars show/ movie/ video game/ comic book.

[worstblogever]

Thom Tillis is so against regulating businesses that, and we’re not joking about this, in 2015 wondered why people were going to make restaurant workers wash their hands after using the bathroom. Yes, this is exactly the kind of guy you want making decisions for Americans as a legislator right now.

A quick glance of some of Tillis’ worst votes in the Senate include:

• January 6th, 2015: Thom Tillis’ first act in the Senate is to co-sponsor and vote for the Keystone XL Pipeline.
• Sept. 24th, 2015: Tillis votes to defund Planned Parenthood, based on conservative outrage over a video concocted by the Center for Medical Progress that had been repeatedly debunked by investigators, and eventually resulted in the CMP being hit with criminal charges.
• December 3rd, 2015: Sen. Tillis votes to protect the right of people on terror watch lists to still buy guns and explosives.
• June 20th, 2016: Thom Tillis votes to protect the right for people to transfer their guns and explosives to people on terror watch lists.
• July 25th, 2017: Tillis votes for the BCRA, aka Trumpcare.
• December 20th, 2017: Sen. Tillis votes for the GOP Tax Plan/Scam, that places the burden of taxation upon the working class and almost none upon our country’s billionaires.
• October 6th, 2018: Thom Tillis votes to put accused rapist Brett Kavanaugh onto the Supreme Court.
• February 14th, 2019: Tillis votes to approve the nomination of William Barr to be the country’s Attorney General, even though he was involved in the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s. (SPOILER ALERT: He’s still crooked as a snake with scoliosis).
• January 31st, 2020: Sen. Tillis votes against witnesses being allowed in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, effectively making it a “trial”.
• February 5th, 2020: Thom Tillis votes against the first impeachment of Donald Trump, in spite of the mountain of evidence showing that he solicited foreign assistance in the 2020 elections.
• February 25th, 2020: Tillis co-sponsors and 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.
• February 13th, 2021: Thom Tillis votes against the second impeachment of Donald Trump, because he can't be bothered to hold his party's standard bearer accountable for throwing a violent coup attempt.
• May 28th, 2021: Sen. Tillis votes against creating an independent commission to investigate the attack on the U.S. Capitol, because he knows members of his own caucus are up to their eyeballs in seditious activities, and he’ll cover for Donald Trump’s coup crew any time.
• March 30th, 2022: Tillis votes against putting the extremely qualified nominee, Judge Kentanji Brown-Jackson, onto the Supreme Court.

So it will come as little surprise that a guy who rode to office by fearmongering about a deadly disease like Ebolavirus and will scrutinize even science is simple as “food service workers should wash their hands”, while Tillis was up for re-election in 2020, he was mostly mum about the god-awful response the Trump administration has had to the spread of COVID-19. Instead, at a town hall in September of 2020, Senator Tillis threw any credibility he might have had out of the window by trying to make excuses for that abysmal response by becoming a “death total truther” and talking about conspiracy theories being spread by Qanon supporters that the “real mortality rate from Covid-19” was far lower because deaths from "things like heart attacks, and slip-and-falls and things like that" were being attributed to Covid-19. (Experts have said if anything, the numbers are too LOW.) Tillis went on to advocate for “herd immunity”, and throw cold water on the advisement of medical experts to continue social distancing until the populace was vaccinated.

And yet, AND YET… this absolute s***stain was re-elected in 2020, again failing to cross the 50% threshold, getting just 48.7% this time out against Cal Cunningham in a highly contested race. Since returning to the Senate, Sen. Tillis has voted against the second impeachment of Donald Trump,
https://votesmart.org/bill/29647/772...emeanors#77257
refusing to hold him accountable for a violent coup attempt on the Capitol that resulted in five deaths and very nearly could have caused the deaths of elected officials, voted against the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 because he would rather do nothing to help Americans during a pandemic, against raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and has voted against the majority of President Biden’s Cabinet nominations. Barring any scandals forcing his resignation, Thom Tillis will now be in office until 2026.

We are now pausing from writing blog posts to drink profusely, given that fact.

[Kirby101]

Should Marvel and Star Wars fans be worried about the proposed changes to Disney's copyright protection? I'm not sure the bill will pass though.

It is being proposed by a insurrectionist, right wing, thug Senator who will get little or no support for the bill. It is also probably unconstitutional. So no, you don't need to worry.

[shooshoomanjoe]

Child! Let me tell you about the time I wanted to make a marble cake. Cracked an egg, found feathers and a beak. I help up every single egg to a lamp for YEARS after that.

Maybe it was balut.

[Zelena]

Child! Let me tell you about the time I wanted to make a marble cake. Cracked an egg, found feathers and a beak. I help up every single egg to a lamp for YEARS after that.

And you suspected nothing before breaking the egg?

(I buy my eggs to a producer and if an egg is at that stage… there’s a serious problem of freshness.)

[CSTowle]

Should Marvel and Star Wars fans be worried about the proposed changes to Disney's copyright protection? I'm not sure the bill will pass though.

From the fans perspective, modern copyright isn't a good thing. If Star Wars was public domain, anyone could make a Star Wars show/ movie/ video game/ comic book.

Yeah, f##k Disney. Sad to hear from Kirby that it's right-wing nonsense, makes sense with the whole Florida controversy, but Disney needs to be taken down a peg or 10. They'd have the money still to put out more movies, they just might have competition. And they might be able to make a good Superman movie (or, more likely, a Guardians of the Galaxy sequel like most of their movies that features Superman but is at least more entertaining than the Snyderverse).

[Gray Lensman]

Yeah, f##k Disney. Sad to hear from Kirby that it's right-wing nonsense, makes sense with the whole Florida controversy, but Disney needs to be taken down a peg or 10. They'd have the money still to put out more movies, they just might have competition. And they might be able to make a good Superman movie (or, more likely, a Guardians of the Galaxy sequel like most of their movies that features Superman but is at least more entertaining than the Snyderverse).

I think they also want to backdate the loss of copyright a few decades. Not sure how that would work out, outside of a probable ex post facto violation.

[The Cool Thatguy]

Yeltsin made the job easy for him, banning the CPSU from the beginning. And even against its offspring, they both had to rig the elections for a whole decade. All this with the acquiescence of the west. By the time the US and its allies started wondering if they wanted Putin at the helm of Russia, there was no one left to oppose him. So yes, nowadays Russians can vote whatever they want, just as Americans can vote whatever they want, with a slight difference; the facade of democracy can be maintained on the US, because there are two "options", while in Russian you only have one. Now, if Medvedev had a fake kerfuffle with Putin, and founded "another" party promising completely different policies, but that would end doing the same... then the charade would be good.

"All this with the acquiescence of the west"

So if we intervene we're imperials and if we don't, we deserve what we get. And Russia can't be held responsible for their own damn government.

Got it