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

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Aren't these the same Republicans who are pro-business? But now they don't want businesses doing what they want if it's a cruise line trying to prevent a viral outbreak? Hypocrites!

Qpublicans are pro-business until it goes against their narrative, just like they "backed the blue" until cops stood in the way of the Capitol insurrectionists. Yeah, they're two-faced as hell.

[Tami]

Aren't these the same Republicans who are pro-business? But now they don't want businesses doing what they want if it's a cruise line trying to prevent a viral outbreak? Hypocrites!

They are pro-Putin, pro-Autocrats. Like Putin, they left business operate, so long as they get their cut and set the rules.

[skyvolt2000]

https://kvia.com/news/education/2021...mask-mandates/

EL PASO, Texas -- The Socorro Independent School District is posed to join some other key school districts in the state in going against Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's order forbidding school mask mandates.

Dallas ISD officials announced Monday morning that they will require students and teachers to wear masks on campus. Houston ISD’s superintendent, Millard House II, has said he wants to issue a mandate, too, and a school board meeting for Texas' biggest district to do so is scheduled for this week.

Meanwhile, the Southern Center for Child Advocacy, a nonprofit education group, filed a lawsuit Sunday night in Travis County against Abbott and his executive order prohibiting school districts, governmental bodies or any public or private entity that is receiving or will receive public funds from requiring masks.

The lawsuit claims that Abbott is overeaching his authority and that his emergency powers should be used to take proactive steps and “not to advance an anti-mask political agenda that has no discernible basis in the data regarding the Covid-19 contagion rate.”

“This is purely political gamesmanship, and has nothing to do with the health and safety of Texas children or their teachers,” Bostwick said.

[worstblogever]

Aren't these the same Republicans who are pro-business? But now they don't want businesses doing what they want if it's a cruise line trying to prevent a viral outbreak? Hypocrites!

They aren't pro business anymore either. They are strictly pro-death nihilists.

This is the Trump GQP plan. Die for Trump, until he's back in power. Because hey, Joe Biden isn't doing enough to stop you from getting yourselves killed.

I really, really wish there was some sarcasm in this post.

[Tendrin]

Yesterday, multiple Texas House Republicans told me that the elections bill will cement GOP control of the state...

But I'm sure that the impact of these bills are 'overstated'.
*eyeroll*

[WestPhillyPunisher]

They aren't pro business anymore either. They are strictly pro-death nihilists.

This is the Trump GQP plan. Die for Trump, until he's back in power. Then, keep on dying for him. Because hey, Joe Biden isn't doing enough to stop you from getting yourselves killed.

I really, really wish there was some sarcasm in this post.

Fixed that for you, WBE. No need to thank me.

[worstblogever]

Fixed that for you, WBE. No need to thank me.

I mean... Sneak preview for my Trump update, an abbreviated version... Can we just recap the past... let's say year?

- Trump actively started ignoring the pandemic in the last 3 months of the 2020 presidential campaign because the way things were trending made him look bad. This included bullying all staff and many GOP politicians to not wear masks to declare Covid-19 a "won battle". At different points, he championed a woman who thinks DEMON SPERM causes cysts in women to push hydroxychloroquine, and sidelines Dr. Anthony Fauci in favor of a guy he saw on Fox News, Scott Atlas... WHO ARGUES AGAINST MASK USE.
- There were MULTIPLE TIMES, about once a month... that Mark Milley, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff made public statements... one in September, one in October, and one right before Election Day that the military would NOT be intervening in on any election dispute. It was super ominous, but now we can see the subtext was clear... Trump was willing to attempt a coup if he lost, and they WOULD NOT be backing it.
- Trump kept hosting maskless rallies and campaign events until the Coney Barrett announcement on Sept. 26th, 2020, turned into a superspreader event that got him sick and almost killed him.
- Trump kept staging photo ops while at Walter Reed that recklessly endangered his Secret Service detail when he should have been completely quarantined.
- Trump immediately unmasked on the balcony of the White House when he returned from Walter Reed, and spent the next several days while still contagious when he was supposed to be quarantining in the president's residence at the White House still insisting on entering the main White House to work out of the Oval Office... ALL while unmasked. Positive cases kept popping up through JANUARY when he left office within the White House.
- Trump lost the election. About 215,000 people were dead of Covid-19 at that point.
- Trump spends the next 62 days COMPLETELY ignoring Covid-19, while the body count jumped to 250 K dead by Nov. 14th, 300K dad by mid-December, 400K dead by mid-January, and almost 500K dead by the time he left office.
- Trump ignored Covid-19 for all that time because he was busy staging a coup attempt, that we saw wasn't just the legal challenges by Rudy and the clown car of lawyers he had, not just seeding conspiracy theories among his Qanon flock to prep for an insurrection (that included the Proud Boys' dry run at unrest on November 14th in DC)... but we've heard some phone calls to people in Georgia and Arizona where they were trying to pressure people to "find me the votes". Now we're also seeing e-mails made by toadies he had in the DoJ to try to just declare him president. The emails indicate GOP state legislators in Georgia were going to go along with this, and Trump was taking meetings with others from PA and MI to do it. FULL STOP: Several Republican state legislatures were down with Trump's attempt at upending American democracy.
- When all the legal options failed, and a few people who "mysteriously resigned or were fired" during the lame duck 62 days were blowing the whistle on Trump trying to subvert democracy... they were shutting down Trump's attempts at just being declared president for life. (Notable mentions: Defense Secretary Marc Esper, who Trump was furious at for not letting him turn the military loose on peaceful protesters, and Christopher Krebs, who was responsible for election cybersecurity, and publicly debunked a lot of Trump and Giuliani's claims about election hacking.)
- The Big Lie was now the only option. Trump's statements to the Proud Boys to "Stand down and Stand By" in the first presidential debate on 9/29 were clear. Those ass-clowns and the Oath Keepers and 3% militia all came down to DC with a bunch of GOP state legislators to attend Trump's speech on 1/6, and then try to force Congress to back off of certifying the electoral college results so Biden wouldn't be the next president. We had multiple GOP members of Congress give statements that they met with these people in the days leading up to the planned attack, and we've had multiple members of Congress like Mo Brooks confirm the White House planned out their speeches for that day.
- Spoiler alert: The coup failed but 5 people died, including members of the Captiol Police.
- The GOP's main leaders, your Sen. McConnnells, your Sen. Grahams, your Rep. McCarthy's gave speeches for a day or two after the failed coup attack condemning it and holding those responsible...
- Behind closed doors, they probably started talking to the dumb s***s within their party that were in on the coup attempt, and knew they'd be f***ed. So they've tried to block any and all investigations into 1/6 since about 1/9 or so.
- The GOP remain captive to Trump, and fight him being impeached for fear his sentence after the trial would be to bar him from office.
- GOP state legislatures begin working overtime on voter suppression bills, and in states like Arizona, literally re-writing election law so that a state legislature can just declare a presidential candidate has won the state's electoral votes. They're setting up a system where in 2024, the can successfully pull off the theft of an election they didn't quite pull off in 2020.
- Trump gets banned from social media platforms. Can no longer haunt the country by rage-tweeting from his toilet everyday.
- Trump gets vaccinated. TELLS NO ONE. Leaves office. Sits at Mar-A-Lago and keeps panicking as investigators move in on the Trump Organization for tax fraud and now, legal complications hit from his failed coup attempt to boot. Has sycophantic morons still in his thrall thinking he can be "reinstated" to power and that he's the true president, because they are INSANE. But there are people dumb enough within their party to believe it, and to try and make it a reality.
- Biden inherits no plan for distributing the vaccine from the previous administration, who never worked on one. Biden's administration quickly gets to work, and while the death count hits 600,000 after a very grim January, by February, numbers go down as the vaccination rate increases.
- GOP talking heads and conservative media immediately begin a campaign of anti-vaccination and anti-mask propaganda. Medical experts warn if the virus still keeps being spread, it can mutate into variants and those variants can spread as more contagious versions of the disease.
- Spoiler Alert: We get the delta variant, and vaccination rates stall in red states as Republican rank and file refuse to get their shots for "freedom" and to "own the libs".
- Republican governors fight to hold as many public events without masks as possible all through the spring and early summer, while arguing against "vaccine passports".
- Republican leaders try to repeat the mistakes made last fall, and to ship children back to school unvaccinated and also are trying to mandate that they don't have to be masked, and in some states like Texas, no actions will take place to notify parents of possible exposures in classes. They're literally getting people killed to deny the Biden administration possible victories on combating Covid-19.


TLDR Summary: The GOP and the Trump administration f***ed up the pandemic response lost an election because of it. Then they tried to just steal the presidency anyway through legal challenges and abusing the power of the DoJ, and when that didn't work, tried an insurrection. It failed. So now they're changing the law to subvert democracy better next time, and still actively getting people killed by Covid-19 with misinformation and propaganda so that they can attempt to deny Democrats getting credit for doing a better job.

[worstblogever]

So, that's the last year of Trump and GOP politics, and how they've become a pro-death and pro-fascism unit.

Again, I'm not being hyperbolic.

And to the claim that Trump didn't deliberately have people gassed at Lafayette Park? I'm recapping for the blog, and WHOA, TRUMP ADMITTED HE DID IT TO BOB WOODWARD.

So when I thought someone was trying to gaslight me and tell me that's not what happened... Trump even admitted that's what he did on tape.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, as well as 2020, that "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" published profiles of Tony Perkins, a former Louisiana state legislator who has gone on to speak in front of the white supremacist group the Council of Conservative Citizens before he started the anti-gay hate group, the Family Research Council, and has been allowed over the past several Republican National Conventions to participate in writing the Republican Party Platform as a Platform Committee member from the Louisiana delegation. In our first look at this Fundamentalist whack-job, we noted how he wants Creationism and Christian science taught in schools, how he defended Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” remarks, his attempts to buy David Duke’s mailing lists, his support of Uganda’s “kill the gays” law, blamed increases on military suicides on the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, and had warned that gay rights would lead to the complete extinction of the human race. So yeah, we thought he was rather a mental zealot already.

Our year two peek-in on Tony Perkins saw him continue his anti-gay ramblings, continuing support of “pray the gay” away efforts, while warning that a Holocaust of American Christians is imminent,that gay rights advocates are about to "start hauling out boxcars", advised parents to pull their children out of public schools because of the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling, and claimed the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage would "trigger an uprising". He talked about how the misconception many on the right-wing have that President Obama is actually a Muslim... is Obama's own fault (Perkins has repeatedly gone Birther, unprovoked). Oh, and he said that President Obama was deliberately spreading the Ebola Virus in the United States and that he "despises our military" and wants to destroy it. Perkins said that overturning Citizens United would anger the Founding Fathers (who actually believed the exact opposite). Perkins talked about how ISIS and their Jihad are the "true Muslims practicing their faith", that the Constitution does not apply to American Muslims, that a separation of church and state in the United States can only help ISIS, and that Dearborn Michigan has those Muslim “no go” zones (it doesn’t). In a crossover of his gay bigotry and Islamic hate, Perkins has also repeatedly stated that gay rights are "encourage ISIS", and predicts that as a result of that tolerance towards gays, pastors will be "dragged out of churches kicking and screaming". We also advise that someone give Tony Perkins a biology lesson, since he has theorized that gay marriage approval would lead to a "surge in the U.S. prison population".

And, in our third review of hatemonger Tony Perkins, we talked about how he summarized the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling as "Obama shaking his fist in the face of God", his warnings about how God's judgment will fall upon America if Republicans fail to defund Planned Parenthood, and how he commented on Texas high school Ahmed Mohammed, being arrested for building a homemade clock by saying the teen "could blow up the White House." (It still was’t a bomb.) Perkins also gave his thoughtson women serving in combat, and said their presence in America's military is a result of "the emsaculation of our culture". Tony Perkins also took the very Christian point of view that refugee resettlement shows proof that "the president and the left hate America". And defended the idea from presidential candidate Donald Trump to ban all Muslims from emigrating to the United States by saying, "Only 16 percent of Islam is religion" so it wouldn't violate anyone's freedom of religion. He also criticized the Obama administration for negotiating with Iran, saying "Reagan would never do that" (conveniently forgetting Reagan did that and it was Iran-Contra). Tony Perkins has insisted that Christians are being forced into "spiritual ghettos", that Donald Trump would be "100 Percent" better for the LGBT community than Hillary Clinton as president (that’s not holding up well), and throwing a fit because a U.S. Navy ship was being named after Harvey Milk.

Our last update of Tony Perkins included how he praised Trump for getting the backing of the Alt-Right (Neo-Nazis and White Nationalists) by saying, Trump gave “voice to a lot of people who feel like their voice has all but been snuffed out under this administration.” We noted his marked transphobia after Perkins’ assertion that it would be better to disband the United States military rather than allow it to have transgender service members serve in it, referring to them as a “cultural grenade”, and how he later complained about the Boy Scouts allowing transgender scouts in its ranks, saying that “American culture “has been emasculated by the feminists and by the left,” to the detriment of western civilization. In a rather terrifying moment in May of 2017, Perkins assesses that Donald Trump is a “God-given opportunity to reshape America in His image.” (Pretty sure there’s nothing in the Bible about an orange prophet with a bad hairpiece and a mouth that looks like a butthole, Tony.)

[worstblogever]

Tony Perkins continues to spew hate and bigotry while remaining a fixture of the Republican Party in baffling ways. He views the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” as the beginning of a generational war on Christians, and in October of 2017, he actually blamed the increase in military sexual assault on… wait for it… straight men in the service being too threatened by gays and lesbians being allowed to serve along side them.

…

Moving on… and this should come as no surprise… Tony Perkins is a motherf***ing hypocrite. It would be one thing if all we had to report was how he defended Roy Moore during his campaign for Senate even while for years Moore was noted as a homophobe, bigot, and general crazy person, but to dig in and defend him after he was outed as a serial pedophile?

But no, that’s not all. After spending almost a decade commenting about how Barack Obama wasn’t truly a Christian, and promoting the myth that he was some stealth-Jihad member or something, Tony Perkins decided that he couldn’t question the faith of Donald Trump, and awarded him a “mulligan” after it was revealed Trump had an affair with a porn star after his wife had given birth to their son. That isn’t a one-off, either, because when Perkins was cornered about his double standard, he dug in and insisted he and other Evangelical Christians would not be confronting Trump over his affair with Stormy Daniels (to say nothing of the multiple other women who Trump had affairs with, and signed hush agreements with). By June of 2019, this fanatic was participating in “National Day of Prayer” events to get as many Evangelicals together and use their deepest supposedly-holy influence to pray for Donald Trump to resist the evil Deep State. No, really, the website for the event had that written on it.

In September of 2018, Perkins reacts to Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony at the confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh to be a Supreme Court Justice by claiming he was being “railroaded because of the constitutionalism he stands for”. In 2019, he sendt out a letter through the Family Research Council asking his followers to sign an online pledge to commit to “pray against impeachment” on behalf of Donald Trump, and began panicking over events where drag queens are reading to children by yelling, “That’s my child, I bought them into the world. get your hands off!” and that fathers should go to the events and “flip some tables” because it’s that easy to threaten Tony Perkins’ masculinity. On May 30th, 2019, Perkins blamed Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky for why Clinton could not have had Osama bin Laden killed prior to 9/11, which was, of course, completely out of touch with reality.

In September of 2019, as Donald Trump’s presidency was in jeopardy because of his attempt to bribe Ukraine with Congressionally approved military aid money into launching a sham investigation into Joe Biden, suddenly, Tony Perkins reverses course on his opinion about impeachment after all he’s said about Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, now that it looks like a Republican president might be justifiably impeached, saying the process “does irreversible damage to our system”.

He would go on to defend Trump for having Iranian General Qassem Soleimani assassinated via airstrike, saying that the killing was “biblically justified”, called on the U.S. Senate to not allow witnesses in the first impeachment trial of Donald Trump, and in May of 2020, upon hearing the public call for a push for mail-in voting due to the Covid-19 pandemic, begins spreading conspiracy theories regarding voter fraud, and claiming 28 million mail-in ballots were stolen or lost since 2012. (that was, of course, bulls***.) In June of 2020: Tony Perkins, upon seeing statues of Confederate leaders and other colonizers who committed atrocities against America’s indigenous people’s torn down around the country, starts claiming that people moving to have them removed “seek the destruction of our country”.

Since we last profiled this hatemonger:

• August 31st, 2020: Tony Perkins gets his tinfoil hat on to claim that a “criminal conspiracy” is secretly organizing protests for social justice that have been happening throughout the Summer of 2020.
• October 7th, 2020: Perkins spreads misinformation about Covid-19 in a blog post, including calling for reopening churches without mask mandates and telling those reading that “herd immunity” is the best strategy to get out of the pandemic.
• May 19th, 2021: Tony Perkins is obviously someone who can be hyperbolic, but he claims on this date that the policies of the Biden administration are “literally coming from the pit of Hell.”
• April 7th, 2021: Perkins, appearing on a podcast, says that the Senate filibuster is “the one thing standing between the radical left and the end of America as we know it. I’m not gonna sugarcoat this. If the filibuster goes, our country is at the mercy of the most evil legislation we’ve ever seen.”
• May 21st, 2021: Tony Perkins praises Republican leaders for pushing to block a commission on the attack on the Capitol on 1/6, claiming that the violence of that day wasn’t actually carried out by Trump supporters.
• June 9th, 2021: On a segment of his FRC show, Perkins offers tips for “Surviving the Rainbow Onslaught” during Pride Month.

And again, for whatever reason, this homophobic, theocratic douchebag with ties to genocidal maniacs and White Supremacists was allowed to help write the Republican Party Platform in 2016. We again would like to thank the website Right Wing Watch for helping us keep tabs on the ugliest moments to come from Tony Perkins and his Family Research Council from the past twelve months. We cannot state how insane it is that a man with ties to multiple hate groups, who runs his own, and is now embracing the Alt-Right media wing of the GOP is allowed to help write the GOP Party Platform every four years. The Republican Party not only lets Tony Perkins help shape their policy behind the scenes, they treat him as a strong endorsement and voice from their Evangelical wing. In reality, he’s a festering boil they should have lanced over a decade ago.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

TLDR Summary: The GOP and the Trump administration f***ed up the pandemic response lost an election because of it. Then they tried to just steal the presidency anyway through legal challenges and abusing the power of the DoJ, and when that didn't work, tried an insurrection. It failed. So now they're changing the law to subvert democracy better next time, and still actively getting people killed by Covid-19 with misinformation and propaganda so that they can attempt to deny Democrats getting credit for doing a better job.

Yup, that summed up everything quite well. Trump and his Cult of Death, a.k.a., the Qpublican Party are clearly hellbent on killing us all. And THAT ain't hyperbole either.

[Tami]

Russia Melts Down: U.S. Rigged Olympics to Steal Our Golds

Russia’s decades-long dominance in rhythmic gymnastics was shattered at this year’s Tokyo Olympics, where Russian athletes failed to win the Olympic gold in the individual all-around event for the first time since 1996. In Sunday’s group competition, Russia didn’t win gold either, losing to Bulgaria.

Since authoritarian countries cherish Olympic competitions as a tool to inflame nationalist sentiments and promote their countries’ global standing, Russia’s defeats were loudly rejected by a host of pro-Kremlin voices—who resorted to state media’s time-honored tradition of conspiracy-mongering.

Experts on Russian state television have been trying to read each country’s Olympic gold medals as tea leaves, suggesting that the outcome determines the new global hegemon. Last week, pro-Kremlin pundits, hosts, and experts relished the idea of the “weakened” United States being edged out by China. The host of the state TV show 60 Minutes, Olga Skabeeva, pontificated: “You can’t beat China. They have the most gold medals.” Eager to inject Russia’s notorious transphobic rhetoric into the conversation, Skabeeva added: “And none of them are transgenders, so they will keep procreating."

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RT's editor-in-chief described the Olympic judges as “beasts,” posted their names on her Twitter account, and called for the Russians in Tokyo to spit at their backs.
She insisted that Ashram can “remain a human being” only if she returns the gold medal.

Twitter Link

[Tami]

North Korea bristles at upcoming 'dangerous war exercises' between US and South Korea

CAMP HUMPHREYS, South Korea — Kim Yo Jong, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s sister and a senior official of the country’s ruling Communist Party, has criticized the United States and South Korea for an upcoming, joint military exercise.

She accused the two countries of "further accelerating the instable situation” on the Korean Peninsula and warned that “we will counter the U.S. on the principle of power for power,” according to a statement on published Tuesday by the state-run Korean Central News Agency website.

“The dangerous war exercises pushed ahead by the U.S. and the South Korean side disregardful of our repeated warnings will surely make them face a more serious security threat,” Kim said.

Pyongyang routinely criticizes U.S.-South Korean exercises as a precursor to an invasion of the North.

South Korean military officials said Monday they would kick off the military drills with a crisis management training session the next day. That training is scheduled to be followed by a combined, command-post training exercise from Monday until Aug. 26.

[PwrdOn]

You may be conflating several different arguments. There are many on the left who make decisions on education policy or opine on it without having a background on the grueling aspects of teaching.

I'm not sure of the context of "nobody takes any of their silly ideas seriously." It doesn't seem to be literally or figuratively true. Many of the policies poll well, and are adopted by state legislatures.

There are going to be some grifters in any area where money is available, but I do think most of the people involved in education and education policy are trying to do what's best. This includes public schools employees, charter school employees, private school employees, parents groups, etc. It's true of liberals pushing for education policies, and conservatives. I'm not sure why any conversation on education policy should be limited to public schools. Progressives have largely been in charge of public school, and the results (as measured by international standards like PISA scores) aren't great.

During the pandemic, conservatives generally argued that the best thing for students was to continue in-person learning. Studies about learning loss as well as transmission rates in schools suggest they had a point. Conservatives were less willing to advocate for people to compromise on their children's educations.

The fact that conservatives manage to pass some silly legislation about critical race theory is hardly a sign that they are serious about education, given that most of them have little understanding of what is even being taught, never mind how teachers are supposed to implement their harebrained policies. Of course, they don't really care about this, or anything related to education, this is just red meat for the base and by the time they're through, nothing will have actually been done to improve our schools, just like all that deflection about mental health after every mass shooting hasn't led to any improvements in that area either.

And you would think that, after spending the last year and a half pushing to reopen everything early against the advice of experts and seeing the predictable spike in infections every time, that maybe conservatives would be content this time to just simmer down and take the L instead of trying to get us all killed for the umpteenth time. What they keep overlooking is that for life to truly go back to normal, it is not enough that everything be open, there also need to be steps taken to restore the consumer confidence and public trust that has been lost through the epically incompetent handling of the pandemic. In order for people to be willing to open up their wallets again, they need to have some level of belief that those in power are looking out for them and not just hanging them out to dry for the sake of making a line go up. They need to believe that the next time they go shopping or go out for dinner that there won't some crazy person making a scene over wearing a mask or showing proof of vaccination, and potentially infecting everyone with a variant strain in the process. Demanding that everyone just pretend like nothing happened and go back to work with no accommodations made for their safety simply isn't going to fly.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Russia Melts Down: U.S. Rigged Olympics to Steal Our Golds



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Twitter Link

The same Russia that wasn't allowed to compete as a full fledged nation at the Olympics because their athletes cheated like crooks? THAT Russia? PUH-LEEZE! They got no room to whine about anything being rigged.