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

[Malvolio]

You left out the "Peach Tree Dish" where the fake meat is made.

As Michael McKean tweeted recently, to be fair, there are a lot of things in Georgia that are named Peach Tree something or other.

[Kirby101]

According to your own link, total student loan forgiveness is supported by 19 percent of the population. It's either careless or dishonest to neglect that point when claiming 64 percent support (while also accusing me of dishonesty.)

Was I responding to you saying "Total Student Loan Forgiveness" was unpopular? Or "Student Loan Forgiveness" was unpopular when I posted that it is supported by 64%?

Let's check:

They are more likely to support unpopular left-wing positions like open borders, college loan forgiveness,

Yep


As for the cost, Please spare us the fiscal responsibility BS when Trump's tax cut cost $2.3 trillion. Your Party lost the mantle of fiscal conservatives under Reagan.

[Tami]

An Entire Neighborhood Is Being Flipped by a Los Angeles Developer

The West Adams remake is displacing many of the Black and Latino families and entrepreneurs who gave the boulevard the distinctive character CIM is now exploiting. The company’s checkbook has made many longtime residents in the area rich. Others, resisting Kuba’s incursion, have paid a price. “This is a community that doesn’t want to be erased, or lost, in this other vision of LA,” says Miguel Santana, a West Adams resident who served as LA’s chief administrative officer from 2009 to 2017 and now heads the Weingart Foundation, a philanthropy focused on social justice.

In 2017, Kuba summoned Abdul Jamal Sheriff, who owns a liquor store a half-block from the Chevron station, to a meeting at CIM’s Wilshire Boulevard offices. He offered Sheriff $2.6 million for his store and an adjoining duplex, about 60% more than Sheriff paid for the business and buildings in 2005 and 2015.

Sheriff told Kuba he needed to think about it. Since scrubbing restrooms at Wendy’s for $3.50 an hour as a newly arrived immigrant from Sierra Leone 32 years ago, Sheriff, now 51, has earned a master’s degree in quality assurance and parlayed proceeds from three liquor stores into a prolific house-flipping business. West Adams is his prize. Wearing a baseball cap, a fitted leather jacket, and Gucci loafers, he sells lottery tickets, cigarettes, and booze behind an inch-thick plexiglass barrier. He has a singular, incongruent dream: to bulldoze Holiday Liquor Market and construct his own CIM-style mixed-use apartment complex in its place. “I’ve always seen myself as a Shaul Kuba in the making,” he says. “I want to be part of the new Adams.”

A few weeks after their first meeting, Kuba called Sheriff in again. It was time to close the deal, he said. He promised Sheriff he could continue operating Holiday Liquor for another year or two until CIM tore it down. Sheriff said he wasn’t ready to sell. “That’s when everything blew up,” he says. Kuba exploded and called him “a piece of ****” and said CIM was just trying to help him because “nobody” wanted him on West Adams anymore, Sheriff testified in a 2019 court deposition.

“I remember looking around Shaul’s conference room thinking I have no chance, I’m a Black guy with three White folks. No one will stand up for me,” Sheriff says. “I told myself, you came here with dignity, you need to walk out of here with dignity.”

Eight months after the meeting, as Sheriff was talking to architects about developing the property himself, the LA Office of the City Attorney accused him in a civil complaint of allowing Holiday Liquor to become an “anchor point” for the West Boulevard Crips gang in West Adams. The complaint cited three shootings and other crimes in the vicinity in the previous two years and described Holiday Liquor as “a threat.” The prosecutors asked the judge to grant an injunction compelling Sheriff to abate the “public nuisance.”

In effect, the city was forcing Sheriff to take responsibility for controlling gang-related violence in the neighborhood. In the proposed injunction, prosecutors demanded he close Holiday Liquor at midnight instead of 2 a.m., stop selling single receptacles of alcohol, prevent loitering outside his store, and grant the Los Angeles Police Department blanket authorization to arrest anyone trespassing on his property. The city also insisted Sheriff install video cameras throughout the premises, make the surveillance feed accessible to law enforcement 24/7, and have two security guards on the premises 10 hours a day.

The Chevron station and another liquor store a block away, both with extensive crime problems of their own, faced no such restrictions. The order would kill his business, Sheriff says. He testified in a filing in the nuisance-abatement case that Kuba informed him he could use his influence with city government to have Holiday Liquor shut down. The city’s suit “was complete harassment to make me give up and sell the property to Shaul,” Sheriff says, and culminated years of pressure by opponents. “With their racist and bullying and intimidating way of doing it, that option is gone,” he says.

[Jack Dracula]

MTG warns that the government is spying on you and is going to zap you if don't buy Bill Gates' fake meat

https://twitter.com/patriottakes/sta...24532231839744

And yet, somehow won her primary. WTF Georgia?

[Gray Lensman]

Was I responding to you saying "Total Student Loan Forgiveness" was unpopular? Or "Student Loan Forgiveness" was unpopular when I posted that it is supported by 64%?

Let's check:


Yep


As for the cost, Please spare us the fiscal responsibility BS when Trump's tax cut cost $2.3 trillion. Your Party lost the mantle of fiscal conservatives under Reagan.

Buy there’s a Democrat in the White House now! That means Republicans will start caring about fiscal responsibility just as surely as the leaves change colors every fall. Probably because every dime Biden uses is less to hand billionaires later.

[SUPERECWFAN1]

And yet, somehow won her primary. WTF Georgia?

They also helped Hershel Walker win his primary and that guy told us all how .."There should be a study on guys speaking to women on social media..." in response to the Texas tragedy last week. Georgia has to be proud.

[Zauriel]

They also helped Hershel Walker win his primary and that guy told us all how .."There should be a study on guys speaking to women on social media..." in response to the Texas tragedy last week. Georgia has to be proud.

They have yet to help vernon jones win the runoff. Vernon is wearing trump's endorsement like a badge of honor. He keeps mentioning the endorsement in his tweets.
I hope those trumpers lose in november.

[Zauriel]

As for the cost, Please spare us the fiscal responsibility BS when Trump's tax cut cost $2.3 trillion. Your Party lost the mantle of fiscal conservatives under Reagan.

Agreed. It was a democrat who paid the country's national debt. And kept the government debt free for a short time. But that was more than a hundred years ago . Perhaps the republicans should take fiscal responsibility lesson from the democrats.

[Tendrin]

Agreed. It was a democrat who paid the country's national debt. And kept the government debt free for a short time. But that was more than a hundred years ago . Perhaps the republicans should take fiscal responsibility lesson from the democrats.

We had a budget surplus under the Clinton administration that Bush promptly nuked. I know time moves fast now, but that was definitely less than 100 years ago.

[Zelena]

Handgun freeze in Canada and five-round limit on magazines

Government’s to introduce Bill C-21, as Justin Trudeau says sport shooting and hunting the only grounds for ‘everyday’ gun ownership

[WestPhillyPunisher]

They have yet to help vernon jones win the runoff. Vernon is wearing trump's endorsement like a badge of honor. He keeps mentioning the endorsement in his tweets.
I hope those trumpers lose in november.

But Walker was a legend on the gridiron at Georgia, and college football rules the roost in that state, which explains why he won that primary, even though he's borderline unintelligible because of CTE.

[worstblogever]

But Walker was a legend on the gridiron at Georgia, and college football rules the roost in that state, which explains why he won that primary, even though he's borderline unintelligible because of CTE.

He's admitted to having disassociative identity disorder. They're electing a guy who literally can promise you one thing, and has a mental illness so another personality will take over and be completely unaware of that promise and break it.

Republicans are getting closer to electing a literal leopard to eat their faces every day.

[worstblogever]

Been offline for a few days, have some "FRED" profiles to get caught up on... 4 coming today.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, as well as 2019, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day”posted profiles of the current U.S. House Representative for Michigan’s’ 3rd District, Justin Amash, who believe it or not, both Democrats and Republicans agree, is one of the most unflinching ***holes in Washington, D.C. Amash is a disciple of the Ron Paul Libertarian school of Republican thought, and occasionally votes against GOP supported measures because in his mind, they are not conservative ENOUGH. He was actually branded a "Whacko Bird" along with Sen. Ted Cruz by Sen. John McCain, and has continued his rivalry with the former standard bearer of the GOP. He has had pundits on Sunday morning shows laugh in his face for saying things like the GOP would be doing the Obama administration a favor by delaying implementation of the Affordable Care Act, and has outright lied about even the basics of what that legislation does (he said pre-existing conditions were covered prior to its passage). He's into the libertarian ideal of smaller government so much that he is against all forms of hate crime legislation, advocated that the entire Department of Education should be dismantled, voted against disaster relief for victims of Hurricane Sandy, voted against the creation of a national suicide prevention hotline, and even voted against the 2014 version of the Farm Bill, considered to be one of the biggest legislative "no brainers" Congress ever votes on. But his "hands off" approach to government sure doesn't apply to abortion, because Amash has stated he believes that abortion should be outlawed 3, yes THREE days after conception (when most women don't even know they're pregnant, and longer than some states' waiting periods for abortion). Justin Amash remains an unpredictable, petulant bastard, but he does remain bluntly honest about that fact. Case in point, he's not pulling punches about the possibility of Donald Trump being impeached when asked about it by the media. The social media director for the Trump White House, Dan Scavino, responded by calling Amash "a great liability". By July of 2019, Amash had announced he was leaving the Republican Party, and in May of 2020, announced he would be seeking the Libertarian Party’s nomination for president. He then backed out of that plan within a fortnight and was last seen questioning the expertise of scientists during the Covid-19 pandemic in the name of "freedom".

On this date in 2021, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profiled Peter Lucido, a former divorce attorney by trade, and member of the Michigan State Senate from 2019-2020 , representing District 8 in that body, and prior to that, who served in District 36 of the Michigan House of Representatives from 2015-2018. And if you’re wondering what could inspire Lucido to scream in rage like in the above photo, that was him turning up as a face in the crowd at a Trump rally days before the 2016 election in Sterling Heights, MI. His first political campaign in the 2014 was, at the time, one of the most expensive races for a seat in the Michigan state legislature in history, and that was just to advance out of the GOP Primary for the seat. After both Lucido, and his opponent Stan Grot spent weeks claiming the endorsements of conservative groups they did not actually get, he won by a slim margin of 103 votes, and was guaranteed further victories in a highly conservative district. Our reason for profiling Lucido is not related to what terrible legislation he’s supported, it’s more of that he has been accused by three different women, including a fellow Republican State Senator, of sexual harassment while serving in office (Thus why his Trump support makes a hell of a lot of sense). The first instance of it being reported was pretty easy for the media to have found out about, considering he sexually harassed a reporter. Allison Donahue, a reporter for the Michigan Advance, had Lucido yell at her and tell her that a visiting group of boys to the state legislature from a local high school could “have a lot of fun” with her if she were to “hang around” with them. She took offense to the remark, justifiably, and after originally acknowledging he said it but meant no offense and apologizing, once calls for him to resign came forward, Lucido started claiming he was “misquoted”. And then, Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow came forward to report Lucido had slid his hand down her back towards her upper rear. And then a third woman came forward. That got Lucido removed from all leadership positions in the Michigan State Senate, and probably wrecked his chances of a planned gubernatorial run he was rumored to make in 2022. Peter Lucido resigned from the Michigan State Senate in January of 2021, not because of the sexual harassment accusations, but because he was elected the Macomb County Prosecutor by, again throwing a ridiculous sum of money into the election, and by criticizing his opponent for not agreeing to a debate with him… where he hand-picked the “moderator”. We don’t expect him to press charges against himself, and still think in the Post #MeToo world, he needs to go altogether.




On this date in 2020, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profiled Mike Detmer, a 2020 candidate for Michigan’s 8th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives, one of five Republicans in the GOP Primary for that seat who were vying for the right to take on Congresswoman Elissa Slotkin. While we have concerns that Detmer a former mortgage banker, has hung out with Michigan’s “guns rights activists” where they’ve openly talked about creating a “Second Amendment sanctuary”, as if guns in the United States were an endangered species…

We’re more concerned about how Mike Detmer has been hanging out with the Proud Boys, and is so comfortable with this group of white nationalists and domestic terrorists that he took a selfie with them. When called out for goofing around with a hate group, Detmer went on to compliment the organization, and pretend as if they weren’t a group of neo-fascists committing violence across the country, writing that the group "is about protecting our freedoms." Detmer than listed the tenets of the Proud Boys, which include defending the First and Second amendments… but missed the parts where they promote Western chauvinism, closing U.S. borders to immigrants, anti-racial guil" and "venerating the housewife." (To say nothing of their future hobby, attempting a violent coup attempt to be carried out on the Capitol in January 2021 to stop the certification of the electoral vote count.) Detmer then gave an interview where he claimed that the Proud Boys have been wrongly labeled as a racist hate group. He posted their tenets "to provide facts, so people could put this group into context" while claiming he hadn’t “seen anything to suggest that they're a white-supremacist hate group”. Detmer lost the GOP Primary for that seat in Congress by only 6,000 votes.

And, we were hoping Mike Detmer would just go away… but no, he’s back in 2022, and after briefly running for that seat in MI-8 again… he’s instead turned around to run for District 22 of the Michigan State Senate, with the GOP primary coming up for it in August. Which is not to say he’s dialed back his rhetoric of supporting the Big Lie, or domestic terrorism as relates to elections, given that he told his supporters some advice about coming to the polls in 2022 packing heat:

”The right to bear arms tells the government the citizenry is armed ... The ideal thing is to do this peacefully. That's ideal. But the American people, at some point in time, if we can't change the tide, which I believe we can, we need to be prepared to lock and load. You asked what can we do. Show up armed.”

Simply put, this is someone to keep as far away from the halls of power as possible, and his ties to domestic terror groups should disqualify him from office. Full stop.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2015, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” posted a profile of Niger Innis, a former Congressional candidate for Nevada's 3rd District who is a frequent quest on FOX News and the national spokesman of the one-time civil rights group CORE, that Niger's dad Roy Innis turned into a black nationalist group that bizarrely would support the re-election of Richard Nixon, and has aligned itself with Republican conservatives and big business for the past 40 years to speak on their behalf and explain why they're totally not racist, against all evidence to the contrary (selling out big for paychecks). Say for example, during the 2012 presidential campaign, Niger Innis claimed that CNN and MSNBC were racist for reporting Herman Cain's long track record of sexual harassment and portraying him as a "oversexed Mandingo". On behalf of energy comapnies at speaking engagments, Innis has claimed the "War on the Poor" is actually being led by environmentalists, and not industry, and has simultaneously attacked food stamps being issued to the needy because it's akin to "the scraps from Massa's table". Innis also defended the racist remarks of Cliven Bundy in 2014, and has declared all gun control measures racist in their motivation. After the deaths of several young African American men in recent years by police officers in highly publicized incidents often caught on video, downplayed a system rife with police brutality and instead said the real problem was "black on black crime". After only receiving 33% of the vote in the 2014 GOP Primary for the U.S. House seat he was running for, he immediately began crying foul due to election fraud, and demanded a complete audit of the election, now a Republican staple.

On this date in 2016, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” posted a profile of Mike Pape, a candidate for the U.S. House seat for Kentucky's 1st Congressional District being vacated by the retiring Rep. Ed Whitfield in 2016. Pape's first campaign ad which showed three supposed Mexican illegal immigrants bumbling across the border, but stopping to talk, in English, about how they needed to do whatever they could to stop Mike Pape from winning office, because he'd help build a wall between Mexico and the United States, and make life too tough for them. Pape didnt' limit his xenophobia to Mexicans, though, as he not only embraced Trump's ideas for the border wall, but called for a halt to accepting Syrian refugees. Scratch that, he called to a halt completely from immigrants from "countries who sponsor terror", which we're pretty sure would only apply to Muslim countries and forget about Ireland's past. Pape ended up losing spectacularly in the primary for Kentucky's 1st District on May 17th, pulling down but 23% of the vote. He has not re-emerged since.

On this date in 2017, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” posted a profile of Robert Bentley, who was forced to resign from office in disgrace when Bentley fired the top cop in Alabama, who dropped a dime to the media about Bentley cheating on his wife of 50 years on his way out the door, saying he was near Bentley once when he dropped his phone, and it had a sexually explicit text on it directed towards a Governor’s aide on it. Audio quickly surfaced of Gov. Bentley making sexual comments on the phone towards his mistress... and that recording was made by Mrs. Bentley, who confronted the governor about the affair in front of their adult children before filing for divorce. It's only a surprise that it took SO LONG for news of the affair to come out, after all, Bentley would answer the door to his hotel rooms while travelling in his boxers, expecting the aide to be on the other side, only to give random unfortunate souls and eyeful. It would not simply remain a family matter, because in an added twist, Bentley used government resources to carry out the affair and cover it up, which is grounds for impeachment, which opportunistic Republicans in Alabama were more than willing to do. The Alabama state Attorney General, Luther Strange, was in charge of the investigation into any wrongdoing during that time, but in a brazen bit of corruption, Bentley appointed him to be the next Senator from Alabama once Sen. Jeff Sessions was narrowly appointed to be the next U.S. Attorney General. Anyway, on April 9th, 2017, Bentley resigned in disgrace after taking a plea deal to accept punishment of only misdemeanors and refunding money to the state to avoid jail time. Bentley's actual time as governor was filled with several embarrassing moments, such as the time he gave a speech on MLK Day in 2011, always a great opportunity for Alabama Governors to distance themselves from the shameful past it had during the era of George Wallace. Well, for whatever reason, Bentley used the speech to downplay racial division, but chose to try to start religious divisions by saying, "So anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I’m telling you, you’re not my brother and you’re not my sister, and I want to be your brother." On immigration? Well, in September of 2011, Bentley signed HB 56 one of the more draconian anti-immigration bills in the country into law, sparking a Justice Department review... and only after a Mercedes-Benz executive got arrested under that piece of legislation did Bentley and Alabama Republicans scramble back to the drawing board to amend it to prevent it from infringing upon immigrants who weren't... y'know... not white. Bentley was staunchly anti-abortion signing harsh anti-choice legislation that aimed at closing the majority of, if not all of the abortion clinics in Alabama. Gov. Bentley was also part of the GOP's efforts to disenfranchise voters with stricter Voter ID requirements, and even moved to close DMV offices where new IDs could be acquired... predominantly in parts of Alabama where the population leans... y'know, the not-white parts of the state. Bentley’s legacy is tainted, and his career is over.

On this date in both 2018, and 2019, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profiled Georgia State Senator Michael E. Williams, who was elected to his first term in office back in 2014. After being the first Republican politician in Georgia to endorse uber-racist presidential candidate Donald Trump during the 2016 elections, in the 2018 elections, Williams opted to not run for a second term in the Georgia State Senate, instead opting to aim much higher early in his career, thinking he had a crack at becoming the Governor of Georgia in 2018. Williams drew headlines four times during his campaign for governor. The first time he distinguished himself as being a concern was in June of 2017, when he appeared at an anti-Sharia Law rally being held in the name of paranoid Islamophobia by the anti-Muslim hate group, ACT for America, where he was more than willing to pose with the Georgia Security Force 3% Militia, who just so happen to be a hate group with dual interests, intersecting as not just rabid anti-Islamic nuts who infamously protested a mosque being built in Newton County, and also were not long prior holding a in defense of Confederate monuments. They’re a nice intersection of hate, and Williams was more than happy to pose with them for a photo where they were flashing white supremacist signs. It was only after the Southern Poverty Law Center and the media took note of their friendly little meeting that Williams’ spokesman gave the meager defense that he thought the militant racists were just “pro-gun supporters”. In August of 2017 when he was outraged at the thought of monuments being defaced, blaming it on Antifa, and falling all over himself in outrage that anyone would want to blast the face off of Stone Mountain Georgia. Only a few weeks after the mass shooting in Las Vegas, that was carried out by way of using bump stocks to make the guns used fully automatic, that Michael Williams announced that he would be raffling off bump stocks at one of his campaign rallies. And then Williams went on CNN to defend his criticisms of Delta Airlines, after it decided to end a discount partnership with the NRA following the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida. Williams began outright lying around this time to say that Delta was still clearly acting on partisan lines because it offered discounts to employees of Planned Parenthood. On air, anchor Brianna Keilar called him out for making an untrue statement, and he doubled down, defending his lie because he and other GOP State Senators in Georgia “looked it up on Google” and then spent a couple days arguing with Keilar on Twitter, claiming that he’d defended his statement. He then began touting his idea to solve our immigration crisis with a “deportation bus” that would catch, per the painted on sign on its windows, “murderers, rapists, kidnappers, child molestors, and other criminals”. Williams got banned from Youtube for violating their terms of service because he was sharing super racist views. Michael Williams ended up finishing fourth on the GOP Primary in his quest to become the next Governor of Georgia. After the election… it seems that Williams fell victim to a break-in at his own campaign offices, and then filed a fraudulent insurance claim that estimated the value of the computers stolen at almost thirty times their actual worth. Williams ended up giving a guilty plea to a lesser charge and got four years of probation for the crime.