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

[Tendrin]

...

As abortion ban proposals make their way nationwide, some GOP states are taking the opportunity to propose other horrific laws. A bill, HB 233, has been proposed in the Tennessee state legislature that would establish a common-law marriage between “one man” and “one woman,” WKRN reported.

Bill sponsors claim the proposed bill would add a new marriage option for residents. “So, all this bill does is give an alternative form of marriage for those pastors and other individuals who have a conscientious objection to the current pathway to marriage in our law,” Tom Leatherwood said. “There is not an explicit age limit.”

What???

However, while the sponsors claim it expands marriage options, they fail to mention the consequences of having no age limit. Since the bill eliminates an age requirement for marriage, child advocates believe it opens the door for child sex abuse. This is because, without an age requirement, there is a possibility of child marriages.

The move is clearly a step back for the state because the state only signed laws prohibiting the marriage of minors under the age of 17 in 2018. According to The Tennessean, the 2018 bill prohibited anyone under the age of 17 from marrying in Tennessee and anyone under 18 from marrying someone who is four or more years older.

Previous laws before this one allowed a judge to waive the minimum age limit for marriage if guardians of a child consented.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/202...s-in-Tennessee

[AnakinFlair]

Ariana DeBose. I know because I thought she did an amazing job in a movie I didnt really care for. What is sad is that she is the first Openly Bi Female of Color to win that award and it is over shadowed and not talked about like it should be because of the slap heard round the world.

So, to sum up:

- Russian forces are withdrawing from Kyiv to the East.
- A number of Russian officials reportedly left Moscow.
- Peskov recently said that they will not use nukes unless their own country is threatened, which translates from Russian as: We will likely use them.

I don't know, I am getting very, very afraid that they plan to send a nuke to Ukraine. I really hope I'm wrong.

The rational part of me says there is no way they Nuke Ukraine. Because if they launch nukes, the world would HAVE to retaliate. Because if the world allowed Putin to nuke Ukraine and get away with it, then there is no guarantee that he wouldn't launch nukes at any other country he suddenly felt like invading.

However, I don't think Putin is rational. I think he wants to bring back the USSR, no matter the cost, and he doesn't care how many of his own people have to die for that sick goal. I also think he wouldn't hesitate to launch nukes at the US if he is given the slightest reason.

Another thought I keep having is that they are trying to intentionally damage Chernobyl to cause another nuclear incident that they can try and pass off as an accident.

[JackDaw]

There's zero reason to comment about the person herself as that just creates argument. A press release is a simple statement, not a commentary; it's meant to be short and declaratory in tone. You go in, make your statement and get out and that's exactly what they did. They observed actions that didn't meet their ideals so they declined to consider that author's work for an award. There is no reason to say more than that...and it's not on them to do so, and nor are they alone in keeping it short and sweet. You'll notice the Academy of Motion Pictures didn't go into details of what happened at the Oscars, thy simply said, " The Academy condemns the actions of Mr. Smith at last night's show.We have officially started a formal review around the incident and will explore further action and consequences in accordance with our Bylaws, Standards of Conduct and California law."

There's no context, no details, no he said-she said, just a concise statement of what their actions will be...and it was the same with the Lamda's statement.

on.

I guess you’re assuming that an organisation that makes such a simple declarative statement actually has sufficient evidence to actually make it practically certain it’s true?

Otherwise your suggested line is a recipe for allowing large powerful organisations to make damaging statements against less well resourced people through malice or carelessness with little chance of redress.

If the organisation is challenged by the individual concerned saying something like “Provide the evidence for that damaging statement” would you tell the organisation “Ignore that request, that’s best PR practice”? If you wouldn’t take that line…what would your line be?

[Malvolio]

Witnesses testifying that he ordered it is evidence. He has violated the Presidential Records Act repeatedly. And he is responsible for what all his subordinates do.
John Dean's testimony was enough to get Nixon, before the tapes came out. The missing logs are a crime themselves, using a nonsecured phone is a crime. Not producing the phone he used is a crime. He is a criminal, it just takes a prosecutor with the guts to indict him.

Harold Hill put a lot of mobsters behind bars with just his testimony.

I think you meant Henry Hill. Harold Hill was The Music Man.

[worstblogever]

]It was on this day in both 2015, as well as 2016, that “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profiled Paul “Skip” Stam, the Speaker Pro Tempore of the North Carolina House of Representatives who has voted to nullify the Affordable Care Act, voted for North Carolina's "Motorcycle Safety/Anti-Abortion" Law, and compulsively votes for every stricter measure to disenfranchise voters that comes up, be it Voter ID bills, or votes to reduce early voting and close polling locations in Democratic-leaning districts. He has also called for poor people from being banned from playing the state lottery, misogynistically told the North Carolina chief of schools to "stick to her own knitting", and once forcibly closed debate on the legalization of marijuana because as he admitted, he didn't want his constituents to write and call and ask him about it. Stam responded to the news that the Confederate flag was being removed from the state capitol in South Carolina by voting for a law to make it harder for Confederate monuments to be renamed or taken down in North Carolina, apparently because celebrating a failed rebellion from a century and a half ago fought over slavery should be a priority. Perhaps Stam's worst issue is LGBTQ rights, as he has on more than one occasion compared same sex marriage to bestiality, polygamy and incest, and has been caught circulating fliers with homophobic content around the North Carolina legislature to colleagues from the Christian Action League, which is classified as an anti-gay hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. He responded to the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling by voting to vote for SB 2, an attempt to allow officials to refuse to perform marriage duties based on "sincerely held" religious objections, and was the sponsor of North Carolina’s HB 2, the combination “religious freedom to discriminate against LGBTQ citizens” law, that also doubled as transphobic bathroom legislation. Stam chose to not run for re-election in 2016, and has yet to re-emerge onto the political scene.

On this date in 2017, as well as 2018, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profiled Kevin Calvey, who on two occasions (2006 and 2010) has ran for, and failed to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives for Oklahoma’s 5th Congressional District, and instead has become yet another member of the Oklahoma House of Representatives whose fanaticism seems to know no bounds. How much so? Look, when someone who claims to be “Pro-Life” is threatening to set themselves on fire to protest abortion, well, we think it might be missing the point just a tad. Perhaps this would be a good time to point out that Kevin Calvey was elected to serve in the Oklahoma House of Representatives back in 2014, but back over a decade ago, in his first run through office in Oklahoma, Calvey did manage to show he’s so “Pro-Life” that he voted for the death penalty to be used on second offense sex offenders (which, we’re not fond of sex offenders, but WOW is that pretty extreme), as well as the fact that Calvey was the sponsor of Oklahoma’s version of the “Stand Your Ground” firearms law. So clearly, he’s all about things that promote life, which you can further see his commitment to by noting how he is vehemently opposed to the Affordable Care Act, and being able to afford health insurance that keeps them alive, or allows their pre-existing conditions to be covered by insurance. Calvey never did self-immolate, and was term-limited in the Oklahoma state legislature in 2018.

On this date in 2019, 2020, as well as 2021, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profiled Eric Porterfield, a member of the West Virginia House of Delegates who was just elected in 2018 in a conservative district by advancing out of the GOP Primary as the third place finisher, making the cut ahead of the next-best vote-getter by… 8 votes. That’s right, it was a difference of EIGHT votes in his district that elected a man who’s fortunate to be blind, so he can’t have watched Legion on FX and seen how much he resembles the Shadow King’s corpulent astral form. But all kidding aside, Eric Porterfield has rocketed to the top of the FRED queue in his freshman term in office, after only a few short weeks into his freshman term in office, he was calling a bill to prevent LGBTQ discrimination as “bigoted and discriminatory” (presumably towards straight people), and uttered the gay slur “f*****” on the floor of the West Virginia state legislature. When a reporter interviewed him about it, he provided one of the dumbest homophobic quotes imaginable, ”The LGBTQ is a modern day version of the Ku Klux Klan, without wearing hoods with their antics of hate.” And by no means did Porterfield start backing down, in another West Virginia House session adding, “The LGBTQ is the most socialist group in this country. They do not protect gays. There are many gays they persecute if they do not line up with their social ideology.” Porterfield faced calls to resign, claimed he had begun receiving death threats from people he said self-identified as gay, calling them “brutal monsters”, and a “terrorist group”, admitting “I am terrified of these people. They represent a socialist activist agenda. They are opponents of freedom.” When asked what he would do if he discovered his own children were gay, Porterfield seemed to indicate he might be trying to drown them, saying he would “take them fishing and see if they can swim”. Even the circumstances of his blindness are ridiculous. Wouldn’t you know it, Porterfield was blinded in a bar fight back in 2006, when he threw the first punch after his best friend said something inappropriate about another tavern-goer’s girlfriend, and got the beatdown of a lifetime for defending a misogynist. Porterfield, not surprisingly, faced a few primary challengers in 2020 for his seat, and ended up finishing fifth out of a possible five candidates. As he is now out of office, we will set aside his profile at this time to cover another wacky Republican today instead. (Current crazy/stupid scoreboard, is now 1087-50, since this was established in July 2014.

[worstblogever]

Mike Shirkey

Welcome to what is the 1087th original profile here at “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day”, where we’ll be discussing Michigan State Senator Mike Shirkey, who was first elected to that position in 2015, and has been serving as the Michigan Senate Majority Leader since 2019. Prior to that, he served four years Michigan House of Representatives after being elected for the first time in, you guessed it, the 2010 Tea Party Wave. His voting record is exactly as terrible as you’d expect, supporting anti-choice, pro-gun and anti-LGBTQ legislation while trying to suppress voting rights and cut away the social safety net for working class Americans. We could go into details further, but our concerns about Shirkey are less about how he legislated and more about the company he started keeping and statements he started making around 2020.

Let’s start in April of 2020, when Mike Shirkey started popping off at Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer for issuing “stay at home” orders during the early phases of the Covid-19 pandemic, which Shirkey assessed was “killing our livelihoods”. (But was, y’know, saving actual lives.) Within the next few weeks, a lot of deranged right-wing loons in Michigan started foaming at the mouth about how much of a supposed tyrant Whitmer was for a reasonable response to keep people safe, and some of them decided to fully reclassify themselves from being “militia groups” and instead officially became “domestic terrorists” for plotting to kidnap and replace Governor Whitmer. They got arrested in October of 2020 before they could carry out their deadly (albeit poorly conceived) terror plot/kidnapping attempt. The part where Mike Shirkey comes in? He was hanging out with these lunatics, perhaps hoping to tell them the things to push them over the edge, and it’s not even a question if he ever was with them, because there are photos.

In December of 2020, Shirkey contracted Covid-19, and emerged just in time after battling his illness to rush to the farewell party for the Republican House Speaker Lee Chatfield as he left office due to term limits (but not before being accused of sexual assault). In a speech that night, Shirkey decided he hadn’t been quite racist enough on the public record, so he went ahead and said that his recovery from Covid-19 was as if he had fought against the "Chinese flu army". Meanwhile, not for nothing, but the two companies Shirkey owns collected a total of $3.5 million in Covid-19 relief funds.

So he reacted poorly to Covid-19, and is chilling out with kooks who that anyone in politics should social distance from even it wasn’t a pandemic happening… but it’s not like he’s given up on democracy, right?

After January 6th, 2022, when an angry mob of Trump supporters staged a failed coup upon the U.S. Capitol, Shirkey tried claiming that the insurrection was a “hoax”, and not to believe our lying eyes:

"That wasn’t Trump people. That’s been a hoax from day one. It was all staged."

That’s not the only deceitful statement Shirkey made… he also has been repeatedly lying about how the election was “stolen” insisting that “too many dead people voted”.

Here’s the good news: This seditious motherf***er will be facing term limits in 2022. We assume that will give him all the extra time he needs to implicate himself in domestic terror attacks being carried out my militia goons. And that’s not hyperbole, he’s still been meeting with them and telling them they need to train harder than ever “to stand up and test that assertion of authority by government”. Proving again that the Republican Party has simply become a terrorist insurgency more than a political party that supports democracy.

[Gray Lensman]

So, to sum up:

- Russian forces are withdrawing from Kyiv to the East.
- A number of Russian officials reportedly left Moscow.
- Peskov recently said that they will not use nukes unless their own country is threatened, which translates from Russian as: We will likely use them.

I don't know, I am getting very, very afraid that they plan to send a nuke to Ukraine. I really hope I'm wrong.

Threat to Russia may translate into Ukraine trying to take back occupied territory - also known as the parts of Ukraine that Russia had previously stolen.

[CaptainEurope]

The guy personally knew Wyatt Earp, I don't think people should expect modern behavior from a guy from that era.

I recently read a clip from an 1885 newspaper about a racist assault in my town on a group of Aborigines being paraded around by P.T. Barnum (**** Hollywood for making him a nice guy) when he took his show to Europe. The journalist not only rightly pointed out racism as the reason of the assault, he also criticized the police for blaming the victims for the assault.
So it's not like everyone back then was racist, and it's not like people weren't getting called out for being racist. People still chose to be assholes.

FN9m446X0AUQcmX.jpg

[CaptainEurope]

Could they be more dumb?

Russian soldiers who seized the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster drove unprotected through a highly toxic zone called the “Red Forest”, kicking up clouds of radioactive dust, Chernobyl workers said.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/li...08d422c5d5f3ea

People underestimate the risks of radioactive dust getting clogged in their lungs.

I remember there was a very popular chart from some web comic that made the rounds after Fukushima that compared the exposure to radiation from the accident to various natural exposures to background radiation, like taking a flight. It completely ignored the effects of breathing in radioactive particles.

[CaptainEurope]

Tucker is on one tonight.

Biden saying "For God's Sake This Man Can Not Remain in Power." Now means the USA wants to kill Putin. Which of course means that one of the 6000 nukes that Russia has will end up in the hands of Anti American Islamic Terrorists and used on Citizens.

Man the fear mongering.

This of course all stems from Bidens anger issues that have us on the verge with a nuclear power.

Did he react like that when Graham suggested assassinating Putin, or when Trump called for anonymous air strikes?

[CaptainEurope]

Trump was talking on one of his personal telephones throughout the afternoon of the attack on the Capitol, so those conversations don't show up in the official White House phone records. It's hard to believe that this wasn't done deliberately.

Yes. If he called Mike Lee by mistake, he was not using a burner phone without any saved numbers. Which means cell phone logs can be subpoenaed from whoever Trump's provider is. (I'd make an Aldi Talk joke here, but the German audience who would get it is very small on this board.)

[CaptainEurope]

What I can't understand is Trump has committed a lot of crimes over the years before he was President but he always seems to wiggle out of doing time. The biggest hit he took was the $20 million for his fraudulent Trump University.

Well, the DOJ just hired ten dozen additional lawyers to deal with Jan 6.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, as well as 2020, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day”posted profiles of Arizona State Senator Sylvia Allen, who twice was appointed or won office after another Arizona Republican shuffled off their mortal coil in an equestrian accident. Sylvia Allen is a theocratic dunce who has called for laws to be passed to make church mandatory, has stated the Earth is only 6,000 years old during a debate about mining rights, wants to drug test welfare recipients, and has warned gay marriage will threaten not just national, but global security. She's also a big fan of conspiracy theories, trying to block the adaptation of the United Nations' 1992 Agenda 21 treaty because she thought it was a "Communist manifesto for the 21st Century", voted for HB 2173, another one of those bizarre bills from Republicans who want to allow gold and silver to be accepted as legal tender, .and actually hosting a town hall to allow wingnuts in her district to discuss Chemtrails. Allen also tried advocating for the law to be changed to prevent investigations into prison sexual harassment, not coincidentally after her son, a corrections employee, was being investigated for trying to bribe female inmates with packs of cigarettes in exchange for oral sex. So that’s a nice show of priorities from ol’ Sylvia. In the meantime, Allen is still in charge of the state’s Education Committee, which is still troubling, because she wonders out loud why she even bothers putting any money towards public education, at all while for those scoring at home, Arizona ranks 48th in public school spending, and if you ask Allen, that’s still two places too high. When Sylvia Allen was re-elected in 2016, she narrowly edged out Democrat Nikki Bagley with 52% of the vote. That narrow margin did not bode well for her in 2018, when Democratic tail winds helping and her efforts to create a ballot initiative to try to prevent the minimum wage in Arizona from ever being increased EVER AGAIN. She’s also was responding to constituents’ e-mail complaints about her under-funding the state education budget by responding with spelling errors like, “Give me a BRAKE”, thus making their point about why more education is needed in the state. And yet… in 2018 Sylvia Allen was re-elected with 51% of the vote. She was finally bounced from office in 2020 when, regrettably, she was bounced from office by perennial candidate Wendy Rogers, who carpet-bagged her way up from Phoenix to swipe Sylvia Allen’s seat in the Arizona State Senate. As she is now out of office, we will set aside her profile at this time to take a look at a different wacky Republican today instead. (Current crazy/stupid scoreboard, is now 975-45, since this was established in July 2014.

On this date in 2021, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day”, profiled Justine Wadsack, a 2020 candidate for District 10 of the Arizona State Senate (she was contemplating a run for Congress, but opted to just try to start her political career closer to home first) and apparently a cast member of Resident Evil 8. Wadsack is a rare member of the Log Cabin Republicans that actually was running for any office, as the group usually just tries to consider itself that the party isn’t as hostile towards LGBTQ rights as they are (We can’t find any statements about how she identifies her sexuality or her stances on LGBTQ rights). We can’t find much more about her other than her work as a realtor, because she seemed to have a general distrust of talking to the media. Well, the media took a peek at her Twitter feed, and were treated to a lot of dedication to right-wing news outlets getting reshared, discussions of election fraud (which is still a myth), promotion of the conspiracy theory that big tech is “censoring” conservatives, demonization of Democrats and liberals, and oh yeah, a lot of interaction with Qanon-supporting accounts and posting the Qanon hashtag herself all over the place. She finally responded to a media request for comment to the Phoenix New Times, and tried playing it cool at first, "I don’t want to be a QAnon supporter, I’ve never been a QAnon supporter. But everything about politics intrigues me, all sides. Just because someone may be interested or intrigued by something doesn’t mean that we are conspiracy theorists." Asked what intrigued her about QAnon, Wadsack said, "Nothing. Just because I put one thing out there doesn’t mean that it is intriguing to me on a general level. I’m intrigued by every single political arm." Note, that isn’t exactly a repudiation of Qanon, when you go, “I don’t support it, BUT IT IS INTRIGUING.” You can’t describe it in positive terms, pretend you like “all sides” of politics, and hope nobody thinks twice, y’know? The more press outlets started to include her in discussions about Republicans running for office in 2020 who were using an insane conspiracy theory to ride its coattails into office and it started to define her as a politician… well, it seemed to have hit a nerve. She made a last statement about it to the Arizona Capitol Times that made baseless accusations about their journalistic integrity, saying, “You are all working for the Democrats and your mission right now before the election is to try and pin every Republican in our nation on QAnon bullsh–.” District 10 of the Arizona State Senate has far more registered Democrats than Republicans, and that is likely why Justine Wadsack ended up losing her race by over 20,000 votes. Once she lost, she had more free time and could go back to posting incoherently on Twitter, including spreading a new lie about how the Covid-19 vaccine causes Bells Palsy, post about Arizona seceding from the union, make anti-Semitic posts about George Soros controlling the media, and spending the buildup to 1/6/21 hailing all the Republicans about to challenge the electoral college results because of “widespread voter fraud”. That includes trying to spin already deranged statements by Sidney Powell into “PROOF” she actually won her own State Senate race by 15,000 votes. She then tried to act like the Republican Party and Donald Trump didn’t incite a coup attempt before moving on to spend her days flailing about while decrying “cancel culture”, warning that President Biden will be “coming for your guns”. As she seems unlikely to make a political comeback, we will set aside her profile at this time to cover another wacky Republican today instead. (Current crazy/stupid scoreboard, is now 1087-50, since this was established in July 2014.

[worstblogever]

Daniel Cox

Welcome to what is the 1087th original profile here at “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day”, where we’ll be discussing Daniel Cox, a member of the Maryland House of Representatives from District 4 who had a failed bid to be elected as the U.S. House Representative for Maryland’s 8th District, failing to unseat Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin, perhaps because Cox has such sensible ideas as creating a 10% flat tax that would nuke the American economy and abolishing the IRS, stating his desire to not increase minimum wage, repeal the Affordable Care Act, as well as denying the existence of climate change. However, Cox was first elected to the state legislature in the 2018 elections, and has been extreme enough in the legislature of a blue state to submit fetal heartbeat legislation doomed to fail. His political background includes working on the 1996 presidential campaign of all-around right-wing nut job Alan Keyes and served as a Congressional aide to one of this blog’s alumni, former Congressman Roscoe Bartlett, and is currently running as a primary challenger to sitting Republican Governor Larry Hogan, mostly based on the fact that Cox was outraged Gov. Hogan created even the slightest of mask mandates, and any government intervention is anathema to a conservative twit like him. Thus, he took his own party’s governor to court for trying to prevent unnecessary deaths. We’re talking to the extent that Cox tried to impeach him over it.

Over the past few years, Daniel Cox has gotten more and more warped, trying to spread conspiracy theories like Qanon, or to link the origin of the Covid-19 virus to Bill and Melinda Gates, while spreading anti-vaccination propaganda and claiming that when he caught Covid-19, himself, his life was saved because he took ivermectin, the horse dewormer that actually does nothing to treat Covid-19.

Daniel Cox has the endorsement of Donald Trump, of course, which is not shocking when you learn that this absolute seditious shite was present at the Capitol Attack on January 6th, 2021, and while there as domestic terrorists were smashing through windows to break into the building, posted on social media that “Mike Pence is a traitor”, which seemingly would put him in the corner of the folks who were looking to see a sitting Vice President lynched. But he definitely was present that day, and in fact, organized buses of pro-Trump goons to come to the rally, but after it was over, gave the meek and brainless excuse that the violence carried out that day was done so by the imagined presence of “antifa”.

Should Daniel Cox manage to successfully win the primary against Larry Hogan, it would clearly be a horrifying bellwether for where the Republican Party sits today.

[thwhtGuardian]

I guess you’re assuming that an organisation that makes such a simple declarative statement actually has sufficient evidence to actually make it practically certain it’s true?

Otherwise your suggested line is a recipe for allowing large powerful organisations to make damaging statements against less well resourced people through malice or carelessness with little chance of redress.

If the organisation is challenged by the individual concerned saying something like “Provide the evidence for that damaging statement” would you tell the organisation “Ignore that request, that’s best PR practice”? If you wouldn’t take that line…what would your line be?

Not at all, I'm merely saying that it isn't standard practice for such press releases to include details. And one should absolutely ask questions...and one should look for answers on their own as well, the issue is that Mets did neighter and he took the absence of details in the press release as confirmation that they acted improperly rather than looking for the tweets in question himself.

I think you're missing the context of the conversation:

Mets quoted an article from the New York Times on an issue where a literary group declined to consider an author for an award after she behaved badly online, and several posters called him on taking the article at face value in its assertion that the literary group was contributing to "cancel culture" despite the fact that it did not include any of the tweets in question. Instead of pausing to think, "Hmmm, maybe I have it wrong" when this deficiency in journalism was brought to his attention his response was that it wasn't the article's fault for not including both sides it was the statement from the literary group's fault for not including such details in their statement...which is just a piss poor and obvious deflection instead of admitting that he didn't stop to verify his source when it presented only one side of the issue.