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

[Tendrin]

So for you, protecting the right to own a gun is more important than keeping kids safe in schools? Good to know.

Well, we are talking about a guy who's made clear his violent fantasies for the purpose of internet shitposting.

[JackDaw]

See the Donald’s accounting firm “no longer stand behind” his accounts for the last 10 years, according to BBC website.

But according to the accountants that doesn’t necessarily mean they are inaccurate. Lol!

Being a cynical sob…it wouldn’t surprise me if his accounts have been a work of fiction for decades.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

So for you, protecting the right to own a gun is more important than keeping kids safe in schools? Good to know.

It's no secret Qpublicans would rather ban books than ban guns. In their small minds, knowledge is more dangerous than bullets.

[CaptainEurope]

See the Donald’s accounting firm “no longer stand behind” his accounts for the last 10 years, according to BBC website.

But according to the accountants that doesn’t necessarily mean they are inaccurate. Lol!

Being a cynical sob…it wouldn’t surprise me if his accounts have been a work of fiction for decades.

The rats leaving the ship that is definitely not sinking, because Trump is invincible and will get away with it all, dontchaknow?

[CaptainEurope]

The Russian ministry of defense is claiming that a part of the troops on the Ukranian border will be withdrawn.

They are known to not always tell the truth, but even the announcement makes Putin look like he blinked.

[Tendrin]

The Russian ministry of defense is claiming that a part of the troops on the Ukranian border will be withdrawn.

They are known to not always tell the truth, but even the announcement makes Putin look like he blinked.

It does seem like America actively kept attacking potential pretexts Russia could have used to invade while hyping the imminence of Russian aggression, essentially keeping the agency squarely in Putin's court.

[CaptainEurope]

It does seem like America actively kept attacking potential pretexts Russia could have used to invade while hyping the imminence of Russian aggression, essentially keeping the agency squarely in Putin's court.

It's almost as if America is competently spying on Russia again instead of inviting their spies to the Oval office for a private chat.

[Tendrin]

This story contains text, images and audio clips with offensive language.

The letter came to the home of Brenda Sheridan, a Loudoun County, Virginia school board member, addressed to one of her adult children. It threatened to kill them both unless she left the board.

“It is too bad that your mother is an ugly communist whore,” said the hand-scrawled note, which the family read just after Christmas. “If she doesn’t quit or resign before the end of the year, we will kill her, but first, we will kill you!”

School board members across the United States have endured a rash of terroristic threats and hostile messages ignited by roiling controversies over policies on curtailing the coronavirus, bathroom access for transgender students and the teaching of America’s racial history.

Reuters documented the intimidation through contacts and interviews with 33 board members across 15 states and a review of threatening and harassing messages obtained from the officials or through public records requests. The news organization found more than 220 such messages in this sampling of districts. School officials or parents in 15 different counties received or witnessed threats they considered serious enough to report to police.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates...ation-threats/

1/3 Manufactured outrage is fueled by reckless social media in an attempt to erode trust in local government. Rightwing “news” outlets then amplify such dis- and misinformation; the results are reported in this stellar piece of investigative journalism.

https://twitter.com/JKassa_PA151st/s...89320896323587

Past time that we had a justice department willing to deliver consequences.

[Tendrin]

Maria Kendall took a break from her job as a cafe manager in 2020 when she decided to do some house hunting on the real estate website Zillow. She looked for a new home in Marshalltown, a city of about 28,000 in Iowa between Des Moines and Cedar Rapids.

It’s where she lived for more than 20 years and where her own children grew up. Maria was ready for a new house with her boyfriend and the three children with special needs she fosters.

As Maria swiped through real estate, she spotted her mom’s house for sale.

Well worth reading.

https://www.governing.com/community/...ttle-known-law

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Got an alert that Remington agreed to pay Sandy Hook parents $73 million.

[achilles]

Prince Andrew settled with his sex assault case accuser, evidently for quite a bit, along with a lot to her sex assault survivors charity. That man really, really didn't want to have to testify under oath...

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Prince Andrew settled with his sex assault case accuser, evidently for quite a bit, along with a lot to her sex assault survivors charity. That man really, really didn't want to have to testify under oath...

Given his connections to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, I can’t say I blame him. If Andrew wasn’t a Royal, he’d be looking at some serious jail time, so he’s lucky in a sense.

[Malvolio]

See the Donald’s accounting firm “no longer stand behind” his accounts for the last 10 years, according to BBC website.

But according to the accountants that doesn’t necessarily mean they are inaccurate. Lol!

Being a cynical sob…it wouldn’t surprise me if his accounts have been a work of fiction for decades.

Trump's whole thing has been cultivating this image as the cartoon rich guy. But if he's not really as rich as he says he is, that image starts to fall apart.

[JB]

Alec Baldwin and others named in wrongful death lawsuit filed by family of Halyna Hutchins
https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/15/enter...dow/index.html

The family of Halyna Hutchins, the cinematographer killed on the set of the movie "Rust" last fall, has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Alec Baldwin, the film's production companies, its producers, and other key members of the crew.

Hutchins was fatally shot last October during a rehearsal for a scene for the film, which was being shot near Santa Fe, New Mexico. Director Joel Souza was also injured in the shooting which occurred when Baldwin practiced a draw with a revolver and fired the weapon.
The lawsuit, filed in Santa Fe, alleges numerous industry standard violations by Baldwin and others charged with safety on the set, attorney Brian Panish announced in a news conference Tuesday.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2015, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” posted a profile of Stephen Wise, a former member of the Florida House of Representatives and Florida State Senate who was a dedicated Creationist, who insisted on repeatedly bringing forth legislation to try to see that his religious beliefs about the origin of life were taught alongside the theory of evolution. Wise was also dedicated to the “War on Christmas”, trying to use his position on the Florida K-12 Education Committee to make sure that “Winter Break” be returned to being called “Christmas Break”. He also was big on drug testing welfare recipients (always a failed policy), and wanted rape victims to have to provide proper documentation to prove they had actually been sexually assaulted to get an abortion. After a career that spanned decades, Wise came up against term limits and mercifully vanished from public service.

On this date in 2016, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” posted a profile of William Flynn, a North Carolina talk radio host who challenged incumbent Congressman Howard Coble in the GOP Primary for his seat in Congress representing North Carolina’s 6th District, portraying himself as a “firebrand” in a debate, and quickly lived up to that reputation when he made the tasteful decision to compare the national debt to, of all things, slavery. He also was briefly a candidate for U.S. Senate in 2014 before dropping out of the race and not just because he was tied to a Neo-Confederate group called the Institute on the Constitution, whose website endorsed Flynn and touted his time teaching courses on the Constitution. Flynn’s luck continued to get worse, as the radio station he was working for, AM 980 the Eagle, announced it was no longer broadcasting talk radio, booting Flynn just after Christmas in 2015. Unless he aims much lower, it seems highly unlikely that he will be elected to any office.[

On this date in 2017, 2018, as well as 2019, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” published its first profile of Michigan State Senator Patrick Colbeck, who has served as a member of the Michigan State Senate since riding the Tea Party Wave into office back in 2010, with a big assist from the DeVos family And they apparently got what they paid for in Colbeck, as he has been caught on tape admitting that the DeVos family bankrolled the Michigan GOP's move to pass "right to work" legislation back in 2013. Or, alternatively, you can believe Colbeck's opinion that passing the Right to Work law in Michigan was actually the work of "divine providence", because nothing screams a miracle quite as much as when a rich dude greases Republican palms to curb workers' rights. Colbeck is not known for pulling punches in rhetoric, either. He spent a fair number of days back in 2013 comparing Barack Obama to King George III of England, and his favorite political quote, which he drops far too often, is Thomas Jefferson's remarks about the Shays Rebellion, that “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” It's also that sort of fetishization of the Founding Fathers you might see from someone like self-proclaimed conservative historian David Barton, who not coincidentally, is another of Colbeck's big allies. And Colbeck is so fanatically dedicated to the historic fabrication that the Founding Fathers intended on making the United States a Christian nation that he actually submitted legislation in January of 2013 that would have prevented the censorship of any history teacher who decided to push this false narrative. What made Patrick Colbeck particularly noteworthy to us here at FRED, however, was how he joined the ranks of a few anti-gay members of the GOP back in December of 2015 to introduce resolutions in the Michigan state legislature to urge all state officials to just ignore the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling made by the Supreme Court that legalized same sex marriage. Colbeck was a speaker at a “religious liberty” rally outside the state capitol, where he made the comparison between the position of Christians in America having to live in a country with gays getting married to that of people persecuted by ISIS. (Seriously, there's video of him saying this.) Because if there's one thing that ISIS pushes on the public, it's LGBTQ rights, am I right? Taking a cursory glance at the rest of Colbeck's voting record reveals the sort of extremely conservative positions you might expect, including support for charter schools like the DeVos family would want, stricter Voter ID laws to suppress the vote, support for TRAP laws to close all the abortion clinics in the state, support for drug-testing welfare recipients, and votes to block the minimum wage. Now, normally a fanatical twit like Patrick Colbeck would be content to just float around a state legislature and be content to play political games when they know they're set up pretty well to win a conservative district (although he only did garner 53% of the vote in 2014). Colbeck made plans to run for Governor of Michigan in 2018, but did not advance out of the primary as his fellow legislators grew tired enough of his hyper-partisan antics that they started removing from committee leadership positions that he held. Colbeck was also term-limited in 2018 for the Michigan State Senate, so he’s now out of office.