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

[Malvolio]

True. Taft's favorite food was steak and potatoes. No wonder he was the heaviest POTUS. He weighed over 330 lbs. While he is not a heavy drinker, he drank champagne on some occasions.


Chester Arthur was more obese than most presidents but ranked below Trump. Reason? arthur loved to eat steak and drink alcohol.

The story I always read about Taft was that the Presidential bathtub was too narrow for his fat ass to fit into, so they had to install an extra-wide bathtub for him.

[Kirby101]

I was 243 when I started slimming down four plus years ago but looked NOWHERE near as bulbous as Trump. But then, I’m also six foot two, Donnie Doughboy is probably a good two or three inches shorter, making him even more like a butterball.

He claims to be 6'2" but is probably around 6" when compared to people he is standing next too.

Justin Trudeau is 6'2" and Trump wears lifts.

[Zauriel]

The story I always read about Taft was that the Presidential bathtub was too narrow for his fat ass to fit into, so they had to install an extra-wide bathtub for him.

I see. However, They didn't say anything about his bathtub crashing through the floor if he sat in it and put his weight there.

Trump lied about his weight, he said he was 240 lbs. But from several photos of him, especially on the golf course, you can see he is pushing 300 ils. He als was not as tall as he said it was.
]
a]

Given that Trump was a braggart, I thought he would want to try breaking William H. Taft's weight record. The Donald would love to brag being the fattest POTUS.

[Zauriel]

Heavy and fat are two different things. When you have to add height and weight, it would be called body mass.

https://presidenstory.com/stat_tal.php

If Trump is 6 feet (183 cm) and weighs about 300 pounds (136 kilograms) like Kirby101 said, then his body mass would be 40.6 kg/m2 (Obese Class III)


https://www.calculator.net/***************.html

[WestPhillyPunisher]

He claims to be 6'2" but is probably around 6" when compared to people he is standing next too.

Justin Trudeau is 6'2" and Trump wears lifts.

And perhaps a girdle.

[JackDaw]

I see. However, They didn't say anything about his bathtub crashing through the floor if he sat in it and put his weight there.



Given that Trump was a braggart, I thought he would want to try breaking William H. Taft's weight record. The Donald would love to brag being the fattest POTUS.

Not impossible…he left the shores of sanity behind long ago.

[Jack Dracula]

The police then needs to train their officers better. If the police department is not remorseful about this incident, then perhaps a lawsuit from the deceased victim's family will inspire them to seek better training for their officers.

I can't argue with any of this. The only thing I could add is that it shouldn't take a lawsuit. Their leadership should be able to recognize that there are blatantly obvious problems with how they perform their work and immediately take action. Why that isn't happening is a f**king mystery.

[Jack Dracula]

Trump lied about his weight, he said he was 240 lbs. But from several photos of him, especially on the golf course, you can see he is pushing 300 ils. He als was not as tall as he said it was.

Everything about that just screams Authoritarian Dictator. Obviously lying about his physicality is very much something Kim Jong Il would do.

[seismic-2]

Donald Trump is clinically obese and in his 70s. Both of those factors place him in the "high risk" category for Covid-19. It is not surprising that his bout with the virus nearly killed him.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Donald Trump is clinically obese and in his 70s. Both of those factors place him in the "high risk" category for Covid-19. It is not surprising that his bout with the virus nearly killed him.

If Trump hadn’t been president and had top doctors at Walter Reed working on him after he contracted the virus, he would’ve died.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2014, "Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day" ran a profile of Don Balfour, who was at the time, the longest sitting Georgia State Senator, riding high after making a fortune as an executive for the Waffle House chain of restaurants. That run came to an end in 2014, when he was defeated in the GOP primary for his state senate seat, partially because he was under indictment for 18 counts of falsifying expense reports. It wasn’t his first indictment, and Balfour claimed the crime was accidental, and was allowed to simply repay money to the state and resume his position in state government, rather than get any jail time. He’s not exactly going to be missed, considering before he left office, he supported a 20 week ban on abortion, drug-testing welfare recipients (which always is a failed conservative policy), and actually drafted legislation to make it illegal to picket against a corporation, which is about an obvious violation of a right to assembly as you’ll ever see.

On this date in 2015, Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day profiled Monica Wehby, a physician from Oregon who ran for U.S. Senate against Democrat Jeff Merkley in 2014, and seemed promising for the GOP until she was interviewed by the Willamette Week, who assessed that she "fumbled her way through" their interview, and "waffled endlessly" on several topics. They noted she was "all over the map" on the Affordable Care Act and gave "befuddling answers that were at times disingenuous”, and that concern only grew worse when she skipped her televised GOP Primary debate in May 2014, claiming that her schedule was “packed solid” and later skipped a debate against Merkley in the general election in October 2016. When she finally did get in a debate, she gave a meek answer in her opposition to increasing the minimum wage during the greatest period of income inequality in the United States in a century… in one of the bluest states in the union. She also got hit with reports of a mother being charged for abusing her children by forcing them to undergo a series of medically unnecessary medical procedures, and in at least 10 instances, the unsound procedures were performed by Dr. Wehby. Her campaign’s statement about it was to say little or nothing because HIPAA laws prevented them from doing so (which is pretty convenient).Right on the heels of that bombshell were police reports that were unsurfaced that showed Wehby had been accused of repeatedly stalking both her ex-husband, and an ex-boyfriend, entering his home without permission and harassing his employees in 2007, 2009, and 2013. Then, Buzzfeed ran a report after noticing that Monica Wehby’s website featured an entire policy on an issue that was plagiarized straight from Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS website, word for word, and When asked for comment by reporters, Wehby claimed to be “too busy performing brain surgery on sick children to respond, sorry.” What followed only made it worse… she later replaced that policy with a new one… which was also plagiarized, verbatim from the website of her own primary opponent, Jason Conger. The worst part? The policy in question was Monica Wehby’s policies on healthcare. She was still a doctor, and her entire credibility of her campaign was based on that one issue, that she lifted all her ideas from whoever she could, rather than have an original thought on the subject. Further analysis of her website showed her economic policies were a combination of information lifted from the websites of Ohio Senator Rob Portman, and California Congressional Nominee Gary DeLong. Her website also featured a quote in a section on the 2nd Amendment attributed to Thomas Jefferson, “When the government fears the people there is liberty, when the people fear their government there is tyranny” that historians note Thomas Jefferson is never known to have said or written, anywhere. She has started a SUPERPac, and claims she will not longer seek office.

On this date in 2016, "Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day" profiled Tim Kelly, a former member of the Minneosta House of Representatives who was a big “defender of the sanctity of marriage”, who also once tried sneaking a transphobic bathroom policy into the state budget in May 2015. That’s why it was incredibly hypocritical for Tim Kelly to have been caught half naked in a car at a park by a Minnesota park ranger having an affair with a fellow Republican legislator, Tara Mack, in September of 2015. His defense was a desperate and sad claim they were not caught in flagrante, but were actually just “exchanging documents” in the car. While half naked. For trying to stuff a few papers into Mack’s “inbox”. im Kelly was forced to resign from his spot on the… wait for it… Minnesota House of Representatives ETHICS COMMITTEE. He opted to retire at the end of 2016 after the scandal.

On this date in 2017, as well as 2018, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profiled Georgia State Senator Josh McKoon, the man pictured above who you might suspect was voted, “Most Likely to be Unable to Find a Comb” in his high school yearbook. McKoon has been in the Georgia State Senate since… you guessed it, the 2010 Tea Party Wave, was allowed to run for a second term in 2012 unopposed, and has only faced two primary challenges since taking office, although one of those back in 2014 was from a guy accused of stealing money from a state park by exploiting his position as the head of a charitable non-profit (suffice to say, he wasn’t a good candidate). Anyway, we’re going to discuss Josh McKoon because of his fanatical obsession with trying to use his “religious freedom” to target every law passed at the federal level, or even state level that he doesn’t like with “religious freedom” bills. Back in February of 2014, it seemed like a long shot idea for McKoon to start seguing from bills meant to “protect Christmas” to start using the same principles to try eliminating the Affordable Care Act by attacking any coverage of contraceptives that the health insurance mandates might cause. Big surprise, throughout 2015 and 2016, he also was using “religious freedom” laws to attempt to make transphobic bathroom bills state law, alienating him from GOP allies who didn’t want to repeat the same sorts of disastrous outcomes that Indiana and North Carolina had seen while attempting to pass such legislation, like tourism boycotts that would cripple the state economy. Heck, the number of film studios who film on location in Atlanta that would walk away? The numbers could be astronomical. Which is far from the only obviously unconstitutional legislation that McKoon has sponsored through the past few years. Remember how Roy Moore got his ass handed to him in court over his obsession with putting up monuments of the Ten Commandments? Well, McKoon sponsored a bill to do the same thing in Georgia’s state capitol. Remember how every time we discuss the GOP’s obsession with drug testing welfare recipients, we point out it’s a failed policy that doesn’t actually catch anyone on welfare using drugs, and it only exists to shame poor people until courts step in and overturn them as violations of the Fourth Amendment? Well, guess who doesn’t? Josh Mckoon, that’s who. Remember how Arizona got the Supreme Court to slap them down in 1999 for trying to make English the state’s official language? McKoon apparently doesn’t, because he sponsored a bill to do that in Georgia, arguing that it was “discriminatory” to English speakers to ever consider communicating people in other languages (Hint: That’s another example where he doesn’t understand how discrimination works). These bills don’t always serve a purpose, either, it just seems like McKoon wants the “religious freedom” to be a d*** to minorities. He wanted to be able to suspend the driver’s licenses of women protected by DACA, even if they were immigrant women battered by their husbands protected by the law. He up and decided one day that Muslim women in Georgia who wear burqas should be forced to take them off for their driver’s license photos (and THAT isn’t a violation of THEIR religious freedom in his mind). At least he’s consistent enough in his hatred of immigrants that he’d vote for HB 87, Georgia’s self-inflicted wound of an immigration bill back in 2011, that led to millions of dollars of crops left in fields to rot. Maybe it’s not that his “religious freedom” is in jeopardy, maybe it’s just that this guy is a total ***hole. And the rest of the Republican caucus in the Georgia state legislature caught on, and started removing him from leadership positions, the whole while McKoon insisting that his actions weren’t just a gimmick to rile up the conservative base to run in a statewide election, but based on his own views on faith. McKoon opted to not run for re-election to the Georgia State Senate as his opposition in the state legislature grew and instead, chose to make a run to be the Georgia Secretary of State. He finished third in the GOP Primary in that race, and is now mercifully out of office.

[worstblogever]

On this date in both 2019, as well as 2020, "Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profiled Kyle Koehler, a member of the Ohio House of Representatives who was first elected to office in 2014. We started to see Koehler’s name pop up back in 2015 as Ohio Republicans began a mad quest to close down every Planned Parenthood in the state, and taking a fraudulent video created by the Center for Medical Progress (a fanatical anti-choice group) as factual, and wanted to close down any facility that performed an abortion and donated fetal tissue for research. The state launched an expensive witch hunt that found not a single witch, and when the investigation came back finding no proof of wrongdoing, let alone anything as shocking as what the video purported, Koehler didn’t flinch, and sponsored a bill to require women who have an abortion to bury or cremate the remains, and didn’t dial back the rhetoric when explaining his decision:

“Whether they are selling body parts or simply tossing them into landfills doesn’t matter to me anymore.”

We’re also a bit puzzled about Koehler’s feud with pro-gun advocate and provocateur Chris Dorr… which is supposed to be centered on Koehler not being “tough enough” on guns… and when given a survey to indicate his absolute or not-quite-absolute-how-dare-you support for the 2nd Amendment, Koehler had the level-headed response to film himself shooting up the survey on a gun range.

In 2020, Koehler was forced to apologize to a colleague after calling them a “son of a bitch” during debate on a bill regarding Confederate monuments, and of course it was a woman of color, who he was trying to get to shelve her amendment because if he voted no on it “it would make him look like a racist”.

We’ll finish up by noting that in Koehler’s voting record, he has repeatedly sponsored legislation to allow for prayer in public schools, supported extreme anti-choice legislation as ludicrous as fetal heartbeat bills, but remains hypocritically “pro-life” because he also voted against a bill that would protect people with certain mental illnesses from being executed for capitol offenses, and he cares so much about “life” that he wanted to block the state from taking in Syrian refugees.

He is currently working hard to try and make sure that would prevent Ohio businesses from mandating that their employees get the Covid-19 vaccine, because he’d apparently like his state to remain a petri dish of plague from now until the end of time. We don’t know when he’s bounced from office, but we hope the answer is, “2022”.

[Zauriel]

Another obese president named theodore roosevelt was actually loved eating big game meat and alcohol especially strong spirits. But he also was an outdoorsman who loved camping, hunting, traveling, hiking and ranching. It may have helped him lose weight . So that is why he has fewer pounds than chester arthur. Exercise is good for your body.

[worstblogever]

I have no idea why with the potential forthcoming indictment of a former president, we've got an ongoing, in depth statistical analysis of how many lbs dead presidents from over a century ago had...

But can we please stop fat-shaming former commanders-in-chief and discuss something a bit more pressing?

[PaulBullion]

Thoughts and prayers to alpha male Alex Jones, who apparently got beaten up by his wife on Christmas.