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

[Tami]

For those without heat in Texas, there are warming shelters throughout the state. See map at link below or call 211 for assistance. If you have a medical device that requires power, call 911. Texas twitter, please add additional resources to this thread. https://tdem.texas.gov/warming-center

Twitter Link

[Tami]

There are 3 power grids in the Lower 48 states, and Texas has its own. Here’s why

Texas’ secessionist inclinations have at least one modern outlet: the electric grid. There are three grids in the Lower 48 states: the Eastern Interconnection, the Western Interconnection — and Texas.

The Texas grid is called ERCOT, and it is run by an agency of the same name — the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. ERCOT does not actually cover all of Texas. El Paso is on another grid, as is the upper Panhandle and a chunk of East Texas. This presumably has to do with the history of various utilities’ service territories and the remoteness of the non-ERCOT locations (for example the Panhandle is closer to Kansas than to Dallas, notes Kenneth Starcher of the Alternative Energy Institute in Canyon), but Texplainer is still figuring out the particulars on this.

[Marvell2100]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/we...?ocid=msedgntp

West Texas mayor resigns after telling town frozen and without power, "The city and county owes you nothing...sink or swim it's your choice!"

This dude went all survival of the fittest.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/we...?ocid=msedgntp

West Texas mayor resigns after telling town frozen and without power, "The city and county owes you nothing...sink or swim it's your choice!"

This dude went all survival of the fittest.

Then those citizens should demand they get back all the money they paid in taxes for services the city and country was obligated to provide, like heat and electricity. What a freaking tool!

[Marvell2100]

Then those citizens should demand they get back all the money they paid in taxes for services the city and country was obligated to provide, like heat and electricity. What a freaking tool!

Not to mention what salary he got as mayor. I hope he saved money because it says his wife lost her job after she defended his post.

I didn't know they were filming Dumb and Dumber 3 in Texas.

[mogwen]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/we...?ocid=msedgntp

West Texas mayor resigns after telling town frozen and without power, "The city and county owes you nothing...sink or swim it's your choice!"

This dude went all survival of the fittest.

Survival of the fittest!!! Even Apocalypse got over it. Makes Boyd sound like a lame villain.

[numberthirty]

Not to mention what salary he got as mayor. I hope he saved money because it says his wife lost her job after she defended his post.

I didn't know they were filming Dumb and Dumber 3 in Texas.

Money?

I just wound up thinking "Man, I Hope This Guy Can Potentially Take Everyone In Town In A Street Fight..."

Think that he could have a few of those in his near future.

[Tendrin]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/we...?ocid=msedgntp

West Texas mayor resigns after telling town frozen and without power, "The city and county owes you nothing...sink or swim it's your choice!"

This dude went all survival of the fittest.

Dude is hilariously trying to claim he ACTUALLY resigned five days ago.

[RisingForce]

I like how America owns like 65% of the world's resources but yet regular American citizens are forced to endure situations and circumstances like that.

It's like "America, a tale of poor uneducated country folk, and then the people who live generally comfortable and secure lives who oppress them and yet seemingly manage to make them vote for crazy fascist zealots like Donald Trump" at least upon a night of deep contemplation I had this conclusion. It's like America is made up mostly of poor country people and then the select few who strategically oppress them.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Republicans Have Emerged From The Capitol Insurrection United Against Democracy

Republicans who voted to impeach or convict Trump for his role in the Capitol riot are facing fury and official rebukes from party leaders back home. Qpublicans have shown their true colors: they don't want to govern, they want to rule, and they need Trump for that.

**********

GOP Tries To Blame Nancy Pelosi For Pro-Trump Mob That Wanted To Kill Her

“I think Nancy Pelosi will have a lot of questions to answer about what she knew leading up to the riot on Jan. 6,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said on Tuesday. I'm surprised Qpublicans didn't come right out and blame Moscow Mitch after he called out Trump for instigating the riot.

**********

Trump Fans Charged In Capitol Attack Didn’t Like Antifa Getting Credit For Their Work

Capitol attack defendants, lured to D.C. by a mass voter fraud conspiracy theory, didn’t like seeing conspiracy theories steal their credit. The stupidity----IT BURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRNS! Meanwhile....

**********

Brent Bozell IV, Son Of Prominent Conservative Activist, Charged In Capitol Riot

Online sleuths looked into Bozell because he wore the sweatshirt of a Christian school and he previously served as a girls’ basketball coach. Find them all. Arrest them all. Charge them all. JAIL THEM ALL.

**********

Ted Cruz’s Tweet About California Energy Shortages Comes Back To Haunt Him

The Texas senator blasted California’s electricity policy when that state faced blackouts last year, but now his own state is in the same boat. Open mouth, insert foot, Teddy.

**********

Joe Biden Finally Says What A Lot Of People Are Thinking About Donald Trump

The president said it twice — and he’s hardly alone in the sentiment. Amen to that, Joe! AMEN!

[worstblogever]

Arizona Congresswoman Debbie Lesko on the Covid-19 vaccine, "Americans and not Hispanics need the vaccine first". She assures everyone she thinks Hispanics are "very good workers" though, which... doesn't help much. Also, viruses don't discriminate along racial lines... vaccinating everybody means the virus can't spread through any population. And Arizona is 30% Hispanic, so...

GQP. Party of White Nationalists.

[RisingForce]

You can't get rid of it

[RisingForce]

[IMG]https://miro.medium.com/max/583/1*wbq9s7xR4F0rh_KT64ncNw.png[/IMG]

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, as well as 2020, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day posted profiles of Arkansas State Senator Jason Rapert, serving District 35 there. We noted in our profiles that while Rapert is a member of the Holy Ghost Ministry that does missionary work in Ghana and Uganda, the darker side of that group is that it has pushed for Uganda’s draconian laws to criminalize homosexuality with a death sentence, and Rapert himself has praised Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni for the attempt purge on Uganda’s LGBTQ citizens. However, that’s not his only theocratic action… Jason Rapert has also tried passing bans on same sex marriage in Arkansas, as well as tried to pass an unconstitutional ban on abortion as early as when a fetal heartbeat is detected, at 12 weeks, and uses the Book of John to justify dropping nuclear weapons on all of Iraq and Syria to rid us of the “barbarians” in the region, while lamenting that the United States can’t be more like Saudi Arabia and handle gays more harshly. Rapert has also outed himself as a Birther, complaining about “minorities running the country” and suggested that President Obama had committed treason by allowing Ebola victims to be treated inside the United States under quarantine. His legislative stances also include support for Voter ID, drug testing welfare recipients, and putting concealed firearms in both churches and on college campuses. Rapert also declared war on Wikipedia in the past few years, publicly declaring any and all negative stories in the media listed against him as “false and libelous”, and responded to a constituent meeting him in public and asking him by policy by refusing to answer to a “smartypants” like them and fleeing in his truck. Rapert then got on social media and posted a vague threat for no constituent to ever approach him again, threatening, “Not smart to come up and harass somebody in a parking lot who’s carrying a handgun. Better be glad you decided to walk away.”

Ah, good democracy, where our elected leaders answer to simple questions from the populace by threatening to put a bullet in them. Wonderful. That’s exactly the sort of lesson I’m sure Holy Ghost Ministries has taught him to express fine Christian values. Speaking of that, you really have to wonder considering after all Jesus spoke about being kind to refugees (and growing up as one, himself), how Jason Rapert could ignore that message and call for all Muslims from being banned entry into the United States in November 2015. He justified that reaction by falsely claiming Islam calls for the death of anyone who refuses to be converted to their religion. Oh, but Rapert also voted for Arkansas’ HB 1228, their own “religious freedom law” to allow for his fellow Christians to legally discriminate against LGBTQ citizens, and chalk it up to their faith telling them to be intolerant, and their deeply held beliefs supposedly cannot be violated.

[worstblogever]

Rapert’s an all-around bigot, as he proved when he called for the removal of a black Arkansas judge who disagreed with the judge working on the Tamir Rice case, who felt that charges were not necessary against the law enforcement that gunned him down in two seconds. Rapert insisted Judge Wendell Griffin was not just writing “racially motivated hatred and anti-law enforcement remarks”, but imagined somehow that his comments were also “inappropriate sexual references” that he imagined where in Griffin’s comments. Of course, Rapert’s grudge with Griffin goes back some time, asking the church to also strip the judge of his title as a minister, and when former Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel weighed in to defend Griffin, Jason Rapert made the level-headed decision to tell McDonald he is an “abortion pimp”. And since we last discussed Jason Rapert here at CSGOPOTD, he has not mellowed out much. Heck, we even missed the time he got on Facebook and advocated for using nuclear weapons against the Islamic State. Sure, there are only a few thousand of those Jihadists left, and it's not like millions wouldn't also die in the fallout if we just nuked them, right? Or that the multiple countries like Syria and Iraq that they're operating in, or their allies wouldn't be pissed at us for that?

Look, we've pretty well established that Jason Rapert is a fanatical ***hole in our previous posts about him. But just when you think you've seen the worst he has to offer, he proves you wrong. Rapert was at the 2016 RNC to support Donald Trump, because of course he was. And Jason Rapert was really mad at the "Never Trump" Republicans present, who were rallying behind Sen. Ted Cruz for refusing to endorse Trump. And so it was that Jason Rapert clashed with fellow CSGOPOTD Lori Saine, accusing her of not being a "good Christian" because she would not support Trump. We repeat, he attacked her for not being a "good Christian" because she would not support a racist, sexist, thrice married billionaire willing to have affairs with porn stars, boasts about committing sexual assault, denies feeling the need to ask God for forgiveness for anything, lies about his charitable giving, covets wealth above all else and has not just appeared on the cover of pornographic magazines, but in multiple pornographic films. But hey, Trump having an affair? No big deal. But Bill Clinton having an affair? That’s SERIOUS BUSINESS to Jason Rapert, who wasted the public’s time and money when filed legislation in Arkansas aimed at renaming the Little Rock airport after anything that isn’t the former president, and citing his affair as the reason why.

That isn’t even the craziest thing Jason Rapert did in the past year since we posted his first profile. Over the summer of 2017, he got on the bandwagon started by notable pedophile Roy Moore, and had a monument of the Ten Commandments built in the state capitol. The ACLU filed a lawsuit to have it removed (which they will obviously win based on precedents set with Roy Moore), but it wasn’t even up for 24 hours when a man with a history of mental illness turned up to crash into it and destroy it anyway. And then, who could have predicted that Rapert’s religious monument would have opened the door for the Satanic Temple to make the case for their own statue of Baphomet to be displayed alongside the Ten Commandments one. Maybe because it’s exactly the same thing that happened when Fundamentalist Republicans tried the same stupid thing in Oklahoma only a few years ago.

Jason Rapert’s attacks upon his own constituents’ access to him have also escalated, as in October, he became the target of lawsuits for banning atheists he represents on Twitter for having the nerve to remind him there’s a separation of church and state. (And based on recent legal rulings regarding Donald Trump trying to block his critics, they probably have a good case to win.) Which seems to be only one social media battle that Rapert is losing, considering in December of 2018 the Council for American-Islamic Relations have called for his censure based on social media posts he made, and only days later, Twitter took notice, and temporarily suspended his account for his flagrant bigotry. (And that’s no small feat.)

In 2019, he began trying to fight a lawsuit filed by the Church of Satan to block the testimony he made in his defense of his Ten Commandments monument, because he’s apparently embarrassed of how stupid he looks in open court. Also, it’s hilarious that he’s the latest Republican being foiled by the Church of Satan over the separation of church and state.

Arkansas’ District 35 might could have avoided re-electing Rapert to a third term in office in 2018… but chose instead to keep this fanatic around for another four years to watch him try and pass unconstitutional laws that will cost the state a small fortune in easily lost lawsuits. We at least can be relieved that he will not be re-elected to the state legislature in 2022, but we’re afraid we have to report he’s planning to run for lieutenant governor. Just… great. GREAT. He’s running for higher office…

We’re going to give our yearly update on Jason Rapert with the briefest of summaries on what his year was like… he spent 2020 claiming the coronavirus was a “political hoax”, raged at mask mandates, calling them “draconian” on his Facebook page, and then… contracted Covid-19 himself by speaking at a church service while remaining maskless, and ending up hospitalized for it. Because sometimes irony has to marinate properly to be as delicious as possible.