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

[worstblogever]

I can probably approximate an argument about how an actress putting Beep/bop/boop in her twitter bio is denying trans people their basic human rights.

Then just do that and stop wasting the time of everyone that can do that easily, rather than demand they do it for you.

Please and thank you. BEEP BOOP.

[Tendrin]

Meanwhile, conservatives backed by people like Carano are doing things like this:

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/202...tum-in-Alabama

In the slew of anti-trans legislation springing up around the country, most measures focus on one of two areas. There are a number of anti-trans sports bills that aim to keep transgender girls out of girls’ sports. There are also a number of bills aiming to make it a felony for physicians to prescribe gender-affirming care, like hormones, to transgender and nonbinary youth. One example of this is slowly but surely moving forward in Alabama.

On Tuesday, the Alabama state House Health Committee gave approval for bill HB 1. The bill next moves to the Alabama House floor, as reported by AL.com.

Trying to legislate trans youth of existence, then use the mental issues caused by denying appropriate care as proof that being transgender is a 'mental problem', inevitably.

[Tendrin]

What's the matter with Kansas? :P

https://www.kansascity.com/news/poli...249970849.html

Senate Majority Leader Gene Suellentrop was released after he was booked into the Shawnee County Jail early Tuesday, accused of driving under the influence, attempting to flee or evade a law enforcement officer, speeding and improperly crossing a divided highway.

The Wichita Republican was booked at 3:55 a.m. but released from custody after a court hearing Tuesday morning.

Well, WBE, you get a shiny new mugshot for his profile! :P

[worstblogever]

What's the matter with Kansas? :P

https://www.kansascity.com/news/poli...249970849.html



Well, WBE, you get a shiny new mugshot for his profile! :P

I remember when I started CSGOPOTD and Republicans had the decency to resign after getting DUIs. Now they don't, and in terms of priority in the queue... when there's people raiding the capitol and/or being anti-mask truthers, it seems like a far lower priority.

Which, it shouldn't. They're risking getting themselves killed and getting others killed.

[Tendrin]

I remember when I started CSGOPOTD and Republicans had the decency to resign after getting DUIs. Now they don't, and in terms of priority in the queue... when there's people raiding the capitol and/or being anti-mask truthers, it seems like a far lower priority.

Which, it shouldn't. They're risking getting themselves killed and getting others killed.

I'll be honest: I assumed you already had this guy in the queue/profiled him and did not bother to check on account of the amount of crazy out of the Kansas GOP.

[worstblogever]

I'll be honest: I assumed you already had this guy in the queue/profiled him and did not bother to check on account of the amount of crazy out of the Kansas GOP.

I mean, and then there's that to consider. Arizona, Kansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and Idaho's state legislatures are... something. The Dakotas and Montana are picking up steam, too.

The red states aren't getting as much redder as they are eating red lead paint chips as babies and seeing the effects.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2015, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" ran a profile of Clifton Johnson, a candidate for U.S. Senate from Nebraska in the 2014 elections. Johnson’s best, and possibly only qualification for elected office was the fact that he bore a striking resemblance to our first president, George Washington. He tried to parlay that uncanny likeness into framing himself to be the candidate in the race who would best serve the principles of our Founding Fathers (like his idea to abolish the IRS and establish a “consumption tax”, where you would be taxed not on what you earn, but what you spend), and thus ride to victory on the strength of the Tea Party movement. Unfortunately, Johnson’s actual message was an incoherent mess, including an immigration policy that would have 8 U.S. Soldiers placed at every mile marker along the U.S./Mexico border. He refused to do press interviews, which is understandable because the recurring statements he would make seemed to only be that “George Washington is back, and he’s upset.” Johnson only won 2% of the Republican vote in the primary in that election and has disappeared from the political scene since.

On this date in 2016, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” posted a profile of Elbert Guillory, who In the 2015 elections, gave up his seat in the Louisiana State Senate to make a run for Governor of Louisiana, finishing a distant fourth, with only about 8% of the vote. Guillory likes to work on behalf of Republicans to perpetuate the myth that Republican policies actually do better by African Americans, by declaring that he was “leaving the plantation”, and that Democrats are the “Party of Jim Crow”. This, of course, fails to recognize the fact that the Southern Democrats who favored Jim Crow left the Democratic Party over the passage of the Civil Rights Act and switched to the same Republican Party that Guillory finds himself in. Y’know, the one whose party platform advocates for strict Voter ID Laws that serve as a 21st Century Jim Crow. But anyway, that’s just the tip of the iceberg with Guillory. In May 2015, he actually argued in defense of a law on the books in Louisiana that allows teachers to promote Creationism or other unscientific theories as an alternative to teaching evolution by claiming there was a time when scientists thought the world was flat, and when religious people tried telling them it was round, it was the religious people who were burned at the stake for their heretical stance against science. Unless Elbert Guillory was born on Bizarro World, I have no idea what his problem is. Maybe it’s just that he’s worried what the voodoo houngans might think. (No, we’re serious. When that law for teaching Creationism popped up originally he argued in favor of it by referencing voodoo.) But back to Elbert Guillory commenting on race… When you’re talking about political discourse in this country being at its most polarized point… Guillory sure does his part. Take his starring in a campaign ad in North Carolina in the 2014 elections to take shots at Sen. Kay Hagan in her bid for re-election where he said that Democrats were “limousine liberals who have become our new overseers”. Or how prior to the 2015 election in Louisiana, when he ran an ad to campaign against Kip Holden, a Democrat running for lieutenant governor, by running an ad where he just straight up looked in the camera and used the N-Word. Guillory’s inflammatory racial rhetoric is far from his only controversial issue, as one of his biggest legislative efforts since taking office was to push hard for the legalization of “chicken boxing”, which he insists should not be cast aside because it’s a whole different, classy sport and unrelated cockfighting (the non-sport that’s actually animal abuse). And his passion for chicken boxing got Guillory noticed by Steven Colbert, who ran a segment on him in April of 2014. As recently as January of 2016, Guillory was still putting out videos to attack Democrats that were mired in conservative fantasy-land, including one about how, in Guillory’s warped mind, President Obama is tougher on American gun owners than he is ISIS (last I checked, Wayne LaPierre wasn’t the target of a drone strike, so…) In the 2016 elections, Guillory tried to get elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in Louisiana’s 4th Congressional District, but managed to finish a distant fifth in the primary, earning about 8% of the vote.


On this date in 2017, 2018, 2019, as well as 2020, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" profiled Bob McDermott, who has served in the Hawaii House of Representatives since winning office since 2012 (after several years away), who moved to the Aloha State from Pennsylvania and quickly rose in the ranks of the GOP there for his brazen opposition to LGBTQ rights. Bob McDermott was trying to ban gay marriage in Hawaii as far back as 1998, when he served two terms in office before disappearing from the Hawaiian political scene for a decade. In 2014, was trying to still filibuster attempts at legalizing same sex marriage in the state, and falsely claim that Hawaiian citizens voted to ban same sex marriage in ’98. Among the bills he’s introduced include an amendment to the state constitution to “reserve marriage to opposite-sex couples” (that would be immediately overturned as unconstitutional via the Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court ruling), a bill to redefine the term “place of public accommodation” to allow religiously-affiliated organizations including hotels, restaurants, movie theatres, hospitals (!), retail stores, and mortuaries to deny services to LGBTQ people. How self-righteously stupid is it to try something like that in Hawaii? Let’s put it this way…Neither of those McDermott bills has even a single co-sponsor. McDermott has also proposed a bill focused on limiting the Department of Education’s ability to implement sexual health education programs which he hopes will eliminate all mention of LGBTQ people in public classrooms, and is also currently at the forefront of the Hawaii’s GOP’s attempts to prevent their Democratic counterparts from a bill to ban public school teachers from promoting ‘gay conversion therapy,’ a practice discredited by all leading national medical and psychological authorities because it is ineffective, risky, and can be harmful. If you ask McDermott, though, it’s the “gay cure”, which would then mean yes, he views homosexuality as a disease. The bigoted rhetoric for him knows no boundaries for taste, either. In January of 2014, Bob McDermott hosted a press conference where he decried gay sex in a long rant, that featured a big focus on anuses. No, really, he spoke, “The anus is presented as genitalia, just another sex organ. This is another example of forced ‘equality’ by ignoring the natural function of the rectum and anus. Therefore ‘political’ correctness dictates that the male rectum and the female vagina are ‘equal’ in terms of being sexual organs. This totally ignores the obvious facts of human biology and reproduction.”

Of late, Bob McDermott’s fanaticism has begun to even carry over to what few colleagues he has in the state legislature. In early February 2017, the Hawaii GOP voted to oust their own House Minority Leader, Beth Fukumoto, for the grievous offense of having attended a women’s march to protest the presidency of Donald Trump the day after his inauguration. McDermott chastised her for this on the floor of the Hawaii House, saying, “You are speaking not for yourself anymore. It is a high-level responsibility.” At that point, Fukumoto took stock of her party, rallying around a misogynistic orange bigot, and with her main ally being a deranged wild-eyed homophobe obsessed with anuses only slightly less than the mad scientist from the film Human Centipede and opted to switch to the Democratic Party.

McDermott continued in his anti-LGBTQ extremism in 2019, voting against a ban on gay conversion therapy and voted against a bill that would establish a non-binary gender option on state IDs.

Bob McDermott still, sadly, won re-election in 2020 with 58% of the vote, We’re wondering if he threatens another run for governor in the near future or not, or when his next bout of transphobia acts up and he makes a ignorant, bigoted statement. It’s a question of when, not if.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Eight People Shot To Death At Atlanta Massage Parlors; Man Arrested

Meanwhile....

There Have Been Nearly 4,000 Incidents Of Anti-Asian Racism In The Last Year

As the coronavirus pandemic raged, the number soared. And it keeps rising. That's no coincidence, especially after Trump and Qpublicans went out of their way to call COVID-19 the "China Virus", leading to the violence.

**********

Donald Trump Tells Americans They Should Get The Coronavirus Vaccine

Republican men are the most likely group to say they won’t get the COVID-19 vaccine, according to recent polling. Well, if those knuckleheads get sick and die off from the virus, that shrinks Trump's base for that supposed 2024 presidential run. Speaking of the vaccine....

**********

Meghan McCain Somehow Blames Kamala Harris For Republican Vaccine Skepticism

“The View” co-host linked a campaign trail comment from the vice president to Republicans not wanting the vaccine. That bitch really needs to STFU, then go away.

**********

Marjorie Taylor Greene Tours Brooklyn Jewish Area After Charges Of Anti-Semitism

“We share what is commonly called Judeo-Christian values,” said a local Jewish Republican leader who rallied outside the Capitol on Jan. 6. Let's not forget that Trashy Greene ranted about "Jewish space lasers" not too long ago.

**********

Rep. Jim Clyburn Bluntly Sums Up Sen. Ron Johnson On CNN: ‘The Guy Is Racist’

“I heard it the way he meant it,” the South Carolina Democrat said of Johnson, who insists his BLM comments weren’t racist. Uh-huh! SUUUUUUURE they weren't.

[worstblogever]

Another intelligence report dropped yesterday. Remember when Trump's installed DNI, former GOP Texas Congressman John Ratcliffe said China was interfering in the 2020 election to help Joe Biden?

That was a lie. It was always Russia interfering in the 2020 election to help Trump, just like they did in 2016.

Specifically, Trump's own lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, is considered to be the lynchpin of a person Russia was using per the intelligence community.

[CaptainEurope]

This is hysterical, you post this is GIANT LETTERS:

Washington Post Correction Triggers Furious Debate About Whether False Report Influenced Georgia Senate Race

And then say that this statement being completely wrong has nothing to do with the story.
ROFL

In Germany, we have a word for that, and it's concerntrolling.

[Mister Mets]

Then just do that and stop wasting the time of everyone that can do that easily, rather than demand they do it for you.

Please and thank you. BEEP BOOP.

You cut out the rest of the response (to the extent that you edited the punctuation) in which I explained why it might be rude to make assumptions about other people's political understandings given the questions that I won't know the answers to even if I'm informed on the issues. There doesn't appear to be a factual dispute, and research won't help me determine if you think swing voters in Arizona, Georgia or New Hampshire agree this was cause to fire her, which is relevant to understanding your reaction. Are you upset that people you disagree with politically have found a wedge issue that may help them? Or do you think people you disagree with politically are out of touch with the average American voter?

[Panfoot]

Are you upset that people you disagree with politically have found a wedge issue that may help them?

You do realize that wedge issue is just straight up bigotry, right? But I guess your cool with that if your a Republican and going so hard to defend someone over that.

[worstblogever]

You cut out the rest of the response.

I did. Because in that first sentence you admitted you're capable of doing what you're demanding others do for you because you'd rather avoid showing empathy.

It was the relevant part. And I just did it again. Because I'm handling the relevant parts. You can do this. You're choosing not to. Do your own research. And show empathy towards trans people.

It must be hard as a Republican to try such a thing, but like you said, you can. So do it.

Full stop. BEEP BOOP.

[worstblogever]

You do realize that wedge issue is just straight up bigotry, right? But I guess your cool with that if your a Republican and going so hard to defend someone over that.

Thank you.

It's really more this. I don't care if someone's a member of what party... if you can't respect the human rights of trans people, I'm not going to "debate" anyone who wants to argue why they don't deserve respect. Not even gonna entertain it.

[Tendrin]

You cut out the rest of the response (to the extent that you edited the punctuation) in which I explained why it might be rude to make assumptions about other people's political understandings given the questions that I won't know the answers to even if I'm informed on the issues. There doesn't appear to be a factual dispute, and research won't help me determine if you think swing voters in Arizona, Georgia or New Hampshire agree this was cause to fire her, which is relevant to understanding your reaction. Are you upset that people you disagree with politically have found a wedge issue that may help them? Or do you think people you disagree with politically are out of touch with the average American voter?

To paraphrase someone else: "Buddy, it's a pandemic. You're supposed to keep your mask on."