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

[Gray Lensman]

[CSTowle]

What in the world is up with AOC and her odd tweets about people bashing her boyfriends only do so because they are upset they cant have sex with her and the reason Republican's dont like her other women and LTGB+ is because they are all sexually frustrated and need therapy?

Odd to say people are attacking her boyfriend because they want to sleep with her.

I remember a co-worker posting a right-wing meme of her screaming at the chainlink fence of the holding facility for immigrants, and making a joke about a gloryhole. She hits all of their buttons for several reasons. 1. She's not white. 2. She's young, younger than most of those who are the most upset about her. 3. She's successful. 4. She's smart (again, smarter than most of those who are the most upset about her). 5. She's a she. 6. She is f##king hot, and those who are most upset about her know there's absolutely zero chance/no scenario in which she'd give them the time of day on their best day (which adds to their frustration). 7. She's fairly leftwing as far as American politics. 8. She's not shy about speaking her mind or standing up for her beliefs (which doesn't endear her to establishment/centrist politicians).

Add it all up and she's sort of the anti-Trump. She's all of the things I've listed above which Trump (aside from arguably successful, though hers isn't exaggerated) is not. She's also earned her place on her own. I'm not sure she has a future as a leader of the Democratic Party, but like Bernie I'm glad she's a voice of it. And if it pisses off right-wingers who can't decide which of the 8 points above anger them the most, all the better.

[GindyPosts]

What in the world is up with AOC and her odd tweets about people bashing her boyfriends only do so because they are upset they cant have sex with her and the reason Republican's dont like her other women and LTGB+ is because they are all sexually frustrated and need therapy?

Odd to say people are attacking her boyfriend because they want to sleep with her.

Ben Garrison won't stop drawing her because conservative women don't have that sex appeal in the alt-right movement.

[numberthirty]

This is how folks feel. Any plan to even have an outside chance in the fall needs to be able to address this reality.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...ld-back-better

‘Seems like a scam’: Americans with diabetes criticize Biden’s insulin proposal

People with type 1 diabetes, who cannot produce any insulin and require it to survive, have criticized the proposal and messaging around it, citing the insurance cap includes loopholes, does not impact individuals who do not have health insurance coverage in the US, and doesn’t address the issue of US pharmaceutical companies price gouging the sales price of insulin, while people in other industrialized nations are charged a fraction of US prices.

“It just seems like a big scam for the private insurance companies,” said Ginni Correa, a 27-year-old with type 1 diabetes in Jacksonville, Florida. “Our lives are being used for propaganda. Wording is very important. Because when you tell the general public that you’re capping the price of insulin, that’s deceitful because millions of Americans aren’t insured and the majority of diabetics who are insured, they still can’t afford the cost and it’s going to go to the premiums.”

Correa has frequently been forced to ration insulin or insulin supplies since she turned 18 and aged out of a state health plan when she went away to college. It’s a constant worry she has to take into account because of health insurance tied to her employment, and the out of pocket costs even with insurance, from deductibles to co-pays for doctor visits, labs, insulin and insulin supplies, and figuring out what insurance companies will cover.

[numberthirty]

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/0...-retire-526533

Rep. Brenda Lawrence becomes 25th House Democrat to retire

[JCAll]

Ben Garrison won't stop drawing her because conservative women don't have that sex appeal in the alt-right movement.

Maybe Garrison will move on from creepily sexualizing AOC, Kamala Harris, and Hillary Clinton now that he's found his true passion: Fauci murder fantasies.

[Tami]

Maybe Garrison will move on from creepily sexualizing AOC, Kamala Harris, and Hillary Clinton now that he's found his true passion: Fauci murder fantasies.

The Alt-Right Found Its Favorite Cartoonist—and Almost Ruined His Life - 06.19.2017

Bigfork, Montana, isn't even a town. It's an unincorporated community with a population south of 5,000, the kind of place where people still wave when they pass each other on the street. Scandal rarely makes its home there. So imagine the shock when, during the summer of 2015, the owner of a local art gallery received a flood of emails claiming that one of the artists she was featuring was a Nazi mass murderer. She sent an email to the artist in question, Ben Garrison, who lives in even tinier Lakeside, 20 minutes away: I want you out of this gallery today. "I tried to explain," Garrison says, "but she was so rattled I had to leave. And that cost me. That’s what they’re after. To destroy your peace of mind and means of making a living.”

Garrison isn’t a Nazi, or a murderer, but the self-described libertarian's political cartoons have made him a darling of the so-called alt-right. In Garrison's work, "social justice warriors" are pudgy, pink-haired, and squalling; mainstream media outlets are metaphorical trash cans and dinosaurs; Islam is a murderous wolf devouring politically correct sheep. Hillary Clinton’s a corrupt witch, and President Trump is muscular, square-jawed, and beige, with flowing yellow hair. Garrison's work appears regularly on Alex Jones’ Infowars. His cartoons have been shared by provocateurs like Mike Cernovich, Wikileaks' Julian Assange, and (once, briefly) Kylie Jenner. He’s been called racist, sexist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic. Yet "they"—the people setting out to ruin his life—weren't progressives. They were hyper-conservative 4chan trolls and actual neo-Nazis.

Garrison's cartoons started out as conventionally libertarian, if a bit conspiracy-minded: anti–big bank, anti–Federal Reserve, pro–Ron Paul. But internet anti-Semites (or at least people fishing for a reaction) started splicing Garrison's work together with the work of Nick Bougas, aka A. Wyatt Man, a director and illustrator responsible for one of the web's most enduring anti-Semitic images.

Garrison tried to set the internet straight with posts like this one from his personal blog:

But the vicious cycle intensified. The more Garrison fought the defamation, the more the trolls—spearheaded by 4chan, 8chan, and an army of extremists commanded by neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin, founder of hate site The Daily Stormer—smeared his reputation. In their capable hands, the then-unknown Garrison transformed into the most vicious man on the internet, with a long list of nicknames. The most popular of these was Zyklon Ben (after zyklon b, the gas used in Nazi concentration camps), but the web is still littered with threads calling him Ben "One Man Klan" Garrison or Ben "Not White? Shoot On Sight" Garrison and other bits of jingly hate speech. The trolls even got a Fox News affiliate to talk about the fictional Nazi version of Garrison by flooding the comments section during the Baltimore riots. "The meme was more successful than I was," Garrison says. "If you typed my name into Google, you'd only see posts about how I was racist, and a photoshopped picture of me in a Nazi uniform." Which is what that gallery owner saw before she cut ties with Garrison.

This is what happens when you side with the side that ultimately ends up trying to take down the country and plunge it into chaos.

[Tami]

MAGA Cartoonist Ben Garrison Turns on Trump After Pro-Vaccine Comments - Dec 23, 2021

Controversial cartoonist Ben Garrison’s latest offering takes aim at former President Donald Trump – who once invited him to the White House for a social media summit.

Garrison’s cartoon shows a distraught Trump riding in the back of a “Vaccine Bandwagon” through a crowd of booing onlookers. The cartoon Trump is making a pained face, while an exclamation and question mark ring next to his ear.

The cartoon appears to be a reaction to Trump’s recent statements supporting the Covid-19 vaccinations. Trump grabbed attention earlier in the week when he announced he had received his booster shot. He doubled down later in the week in an interview with Candace Owens, saying the vaccines are keeping people from dying.

“The vaccine is one of the greatest achievements of mankind,” Trump added.

Garrison is a fierce critic of the Covid-19 vaccines and made headlines in September for treating his severe case of the virus with beet juice and ivermectin, an anti-parasite drug often prescribed for livestock and not shown to be effective in combating Covid-19, a virus, in humans.

In 2019, Trump raised eyebrows by inviting Garrison to the White House. Garrison, a longtime supporter of Trump (at least before this latest cartoon), had elicited accusations of antisemitism for depicting Jews as puppet masters.

[Tami]

House Republicans Backtrack After Briefly Forgetting That Trump Says the Vaccine Is Good Now

On Dec. 19, Donald Trump told an audience at an event with Bill O’Reilly in Dallas that he’d gotten a booster shot of a COVID-19 vaccine. Some of the people in the crowd booed, and the ex-president took guff in the following days from some his supporters, many of whom reject the vaccine and believe that public health responses to COVID are, at best, hysterical overreactions being driven by know-it-all liberals. Trump frequently takes that position himself but, per his remarks at the event and other comments that O’Reilly made later, is annoyed that he’s not getting enough personal credit for the vaccines having been developed under the auspices of his administration.

Initially, the backlash against Trump’s statement mostly took place in the far-right, more overtly conspiracy-oriented part of the MAGA world, with his critics including Jan. 6 organizer Ali Alexander, QAnon guy Ron Watkins, and Infowars proprietor Alex Jones, whose site, I never tire of writing, has aired accusations that NASA is running child slavery colonies on Mars. The most mainstream-ish figures to express disappointment about the vaccine endorsement were probably cartoonist Ben Garrison and social media content farm pundit Candace Owens, although Owens said it wasn’t Trump’s fault that he was wrong about the issue because he’s too old to do his own research online.

But! On Dec. 30, the Twitter account run by the House Judiciary Committee’s Republican minority posed the following question: “If the booster shots work, why don’t they work?” The ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee is Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, a hardcore MAGA guy who, for better or for worse, is part of the elected Republican mainstream. His committee’s tweet highlighted a confrontation between the MAGA value of being dismissive about COVID and the MAGA value of defending anything that Trump does or says. It was a test of whether the movement has become too big for Trump to direct unilaterally.

The result of the test was that the Judiciary Republicans account swiftly deleted the tweet in question after it started getting circulated. A spokesman for Jordan did not respond to a request to clarify his position on vaccine efficacy over the most recent holiday weekend. Donald Trump: still No. 1!

[Kirby101]

This is how folks feel. Any plan to even have an outside chance in the fall needs to be able to address this reality.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...ld-back-better

The author is a muckraker, it the best sense of the word. But it is still an article with a strong leftist political agenda, this one for Universal Healthcare, and not an objective review of this proposal.
Other articles by Sainato https://www.theguardian.com/profile/michael-sainato

How much time do you spend tracking down anti-Biden articles?

[Hellion]

MAGA Cartoonist Ben Garrison Turns on Trump After Pro-Vaccine Comments - Dec 23, 2021

Thanks for the info! I had no idea I lived within spitting distance of this idiot.

[Kirby101]

All Americans Know January 6th Was An Insurrection. Decent Ones Care.

This unthinkable act of violence was not only an inside job, but one whose genesis came from the very highest level of our public servants and brought us the width of an onion-skin from complete collapse. We were literally a handful of courageous officers, a few quick-thinking politicians, and one or two fortuitous seconds from an overturned election, an installed dictator, and an unrecognizable America.

But perhaps worse than all of all we have learned about January 6th, even more tragic has been the response to that day from people we know and love: an infuriating multiple choice of gaslighting, denial, and complete silence.

[shooshoomanjoe]

This is how folks feel. Any plan to even have an outside chance in the fall needs to be able to address this reality.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...ld-back-better

President Biden wants to cap insulin at $35 a month. How is that bad?

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2015, 2016, 2017, as well as 2018, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day”posted profiles of Lyle Rowland, a member of the Missouri House of Representatives, hailing from the Show-Me-State’s District 155 who wrote Missouri’s own “Birther Bill”, HB 283 back in 2011, and after it did not pass, he actually submitted a second one in 2012, HB 1046. The idea that President Obama is secretly not an American citizen and “stole” the 2008 and 2012 elections is not the only paranoid conspiracy theory that Rowland believes in, though, as he also submitted legislation to prevent the adaptation of environmental standards from the United Nations’ Agenda 21 treaty from 1992, with his reason for the move being a video from Glenn Beck raving like a lunatic about how it’s a secret plot for global domination. Among his “smaller government” priorities has been his need to respond to the public outcry after the killing of Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson, by taking the classy step of trying to vote for SB 199, to amend the justification for deadly force to make it EASIER for police to get away with shooting civilians, and also another vote for HB 499, a bill that would require not just all public school students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance with “under God” in it, but specifically to have to do so in English (which based on previous court rulings, is unconstitutional on multiple levels). He’s also tried to nullify federal gun laws, legalize guns in schools, and pass legislation to create unnecessary waiting periods for abortions, to round out his rap sheet. Since Rowland took office in 2010, he only once faced a primary challenger for his seat in 2016, and has never been challenged by a Democrat. After four terms in the Missouri House, he faced term limits in 2018 and had to leave office.

On this date in 2020, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” first profiled Warren Love, a member of the Missouri House of Representatives first elected in 2016. He's pretty damned racist, as we’ll get to the bulk of why, but there was a tip-off in January of 2016 when he made a reference to a “black Negro” in a committee meeting. It didn’t get better from there. In August of 2017, after the campaign of terror carried out by White Nationalists in Charlottesville, a push back against hatred began, with Confederate monuments around the country getting torn down, or in some instances, vandalized. Warren Love responded to the removal and vandalism by getting on Facebook and calling for those who would act against memorials to a failed rebellion carried out in the name of keeping African Americans slaves to be “hung from a tall tree”. We’ll repeat that… he called for opponents of Confederate monuments to be LYNCHED. Now, almost immediately after that, Love was criticized from both sides of the aisle, but he tried a folksy version of the “I was taken out of context” defense, saying, “That was an exaggerated statement that, you know, a lot of times is used in the Western world when somebody does a crime or commits theft.... That’s just a Western term, and I’m very much a Western man.... You know, I wear a coat. You know, I dress Western. And, you know, I’m the cowboy of the Capitol.” And then, people realized that his comments were not a one off, as Love, a member of the GOP, offered some unique thoughts in another Facebook post, about the founder of his party, Abraham Lincoln, and how “Lincoln was the greatest despot and tyrant in American history.” Almost every Democrat in the Missouri state legislature, and several Republicans called for Love’s resignation,but when it came time to actually reprimand him and remove him from his committee assignments, Missouri Republicans managed to somehow look the other way, and not vote to take him to task. We’ll note that when you look at Warren Love’s voting record, you’ll find other evidence other than his love for the Confederacy that shows he’s has his head either up his arse and/or in the 19th Century, like how he voted against a measure to prevent child marriages in Missouri, is a supporter of Personhood, as well as support for Voter ID measures that are the modern equivalent of Jim Crow legislation. Love also voted for nullification legislation to attempt to ignore federal firearms legislations, voted for paranoid and unnecessary anti-Sharia legislation aimed at banning “foreign laws”, and voted to try and block the implementation of the United Nations’ Agenda 21 Treaty (because he’s apparently convinced it’s a plot for global domination), and he also voted for a clearly unconstitutional measure that not only would force schoolchildren to recite the Pledge of Allegiance every day, but specified that it must be spoken IN ENGLISH. Luckily, Warren Love was term-limited in 2020.

On this date in 2021, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profiled Joe Thalman, a 2020 candidate running for a seat in the Minnesota House of Representatives, specifically in District 49B. We are profiling him because he is yet the latest in a line of Qanon conspiracy theorists who got on the ballot this year as a Republican trying to win office, having repeatedly made posts on social media with the Qanon hashtag. When asked about Qanon by the local press, Thalman offered, ”I’m aware of Q and I’m aware that there are other attributions of that phrase as well. General (Michael) Flynn had made the same statement on a post that he had done a day or two before. I love the sound of it. … I like the spirited statement.” When the negative press started to be a detriment to Thalman, he revisited the topic, adding, “It’s one of many news sources that a lot of people are going to outside of the traditional mainstream media. I would suggest people always do their own research and come to their own conclusions.” We couldn’t find much else about Thalman on issue stances outside of his love of Qanon, but we can say when it comes to Coronavirus, he’s a true Covidiot, focusing on wanting the economy opened without giving any thought or mention to the hundreds of thousands of people who have died, or any concern for public health. Joe Thalman was defeated in the 2020 election, getting only 38% of the vote. As he seems unlikely to ever reach office, we will retire his profile to cover another wacky Republican today instead. (Current crazy/stupid scoreboard, is now 1062-50, since this was established in July 2014.

[worstblogever]

Larry Elder

Welcome to what is the 1062nd original profile here at “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day”, where we’ll be discussing Larry Elder, the long-time right-wing radio talk show host who made a bid in a 2020 recall election to become the next Governor of California. This is amazing, given Larry Elder’s disgusting laundry list of terrible hyper-conservative takes. Just on racial issues alone, he’s on record that he wouldn’t have supported the Civil Rights Act when it was passed, that police are more inclined in his mind to shoot white people than black people, that voter suppression against minorities doesn’t exist, his never-ending vitriol towards the Black Lives Matter movement, and his denial that racism even exists.

There’s a reason there have been several protests outside of Los Angeles conservative radio stations airing Elder’s show calling for him to be fired, and that’s just a handful.

Let’s also consider that he was accused of sexual harassment while working in radio back in 2011, and his defense amounted to, “she’s too ugly for me to have done it" (right out of Donald Trump’s playbook, frankly), that he once allegedly pulled a gun on his own girlfriend in 2014, that he denies the existence of sexism, and then there’s his contempt for the disabled, with his maniacal opinion that the Americans with Disabilities Act should be undone and employers should be allowed to fire workers with disabilities.

Does he deny science, as well as all the realities of discrimination? You know he does… Elder called climate change a “crock” back in 2008, and has spread misinformation about Covid-19, masks, and vaccines during the pandemic.

There’s of course his opposition to the minimum wage (he said it should be set at $0.00, which is… kinda slavery) his belief that emergency aid should be denied to undocumented immigrants, and that he helped spread the conspiracy theory that the 2020 presidential election was somehow “stolen” from Donald Trump.

Gavin Newsom failed to be recalled, and it wasn’t even close. The final tally had him with 62% of the vote in the “Recall: Yes/No”, portion of the ballot. Which is good, because somehow, Elder did receive the majority of 48% of the vote from those who wanted Newsom gone, because conservatives, even in a blue state like California will pick the worst people to cause as much pain as possible out of spite. With any luck, Larry Elder f***s off on past the horizon like all libertarian-wing trolls deserve to do.