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

[Jack Dracula]

Fox News pundit and ventriloquist dummy who wished real hard and now he's a real boy Tucker Carlson is afraid gun-toting trans people will start "political violence".

He should be.

Besides, I thought that's what the 2nd Amendment folks were all about? Government tyranny and all that. I can't think of anything more tyrannical than the government telling you you're not allowed to exist.

It’s only tyranny if Democrats want it.

[CaptainEurope]

Trump's attempt to escape a trial in E. Jean Carroll case is denied

In a new filing on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan denied Trump's motion.

"The contrasts between Mr. Trump’s assertions in his Carroll I answer and his October 12 statement show that a reasonable juror could find that his statement had a different effect on a reader than his denials and affirmative defense in his answer," the judge wrote. "For one, 'a reasonable juror could find that [Mr.] Trump was complaining of a far broader and more corrosive conspiracy than anything that was at issue in Carroll I in October 2022,' including based on his statements that Ms. Carroll 'completely made up a story' that is a 'Hoax' and 'changed her story from beginning to end [(in an interview where she was promoting her book)]. .. to suit the purposes of CNN and And [erson] Cooper,' along with his comments about the judiciary and Ms. Carroll's counsel."

The Court need not and does not now decide the ultimate issue of whether Mr. Trump's statement is or is not a "fair and true."

"It suffices for the purpose of denying summary judgment that a reasonable jury could find so as a matter of fact. For the foregoing reasons, Mr. Trump's motion for partial summary judgment is denied," the 22-page document closes.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Saw this on Twitter, and it's a question worth asking:

[hyped78]

No, there were a lot of chickenshit cops who stood by and did nothing.

I'll note that I asked you for proof of what you wrote earlier and you disregarded that - so I will assume that you basically completely made up that the claims done by Shamirun Nessa have all been debunked

[WestPhillyPunisher]

I'll note that I asked you for proof of what you wrote earlier and you disregarded that - so I will assume that you basically invented that the claims done by Shamirun Nessa have all been debunked

No, FACTS:

Uvalde cops were too scared of school shooter’s ‘battle rifle’ AR-15

[hyped78]

No, FACTS:

Uvalde cops were too scared of school shooter’s ‘battle rifle’ AR-15

Sorry, I was previously talking to Spike-X about something completely different, not Uvalde. It was about Shamirun Nessa and Jeffrey Marsh. I quoted Spike-X because he never backed up what he said on that topic, after saying that all the claims had been debunked. Different topic vs. what you were discussing, sorry.

[hyped78]

Adidas backtracks on Black Lives Matter design opposition

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65107924

I'm confused as to why Adidas opposed this in the first place. How is anyone going to mistake BLM's three yellow stripes for Adidas' stripes? At least they've backtracked on this.

[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 gy, 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.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2022, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profiled 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. 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? Well, he tried convincing everyone that Trump supporters did not, in fact, stage an insurrection on January 6th, 2021, and it’s all a “hoax” and has since gone on to openly claim that “too many dead people voted” in the 2020 election and that it was “stolen” from Donald Trump. Since facing term limits in 2022, Shirkey has still been meeting with militia groups 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. As he seems more likely to face arrest on domestic terrorism charges than be re-elected, we will set aside his profile at this time, to cover another wacky Republican today instead. (Current crazy/stupid scoreboard, is now 1191-55, since this was established in July 2014.


Chris Johansen
Welcome to what is the 1191st original profile here at “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day”, where we’ll be discussing Chris Johansen, a former law enforcement officer and member of the Maine House of Representatives who was first elected to that office in 2016, and was re-elected twice in 2018 and 2020. Saying that as a legislator, he was an obstructionist would be an understatement, as his voting record has only a handful of times he ever voted “yes”. But we’re not profiling him for that, it’s more related to someone winning stupid prizes for being stupid.

From the point that Covid-19 precautions and vaccine mandates were put in place in Maine, Johansen was fighting back against them tooth and nail, and hosting public protests of whatever actions were being taken by Gov. Janet Mills to stop the spread of coronavirus. He refused to wear masks, per the rules established within the Maine House of Representatives during the pandemic, and his stubbornness finally caught up to him about a year and a half later, when he and his wife both caught Covid-19. Mrs. Johansen did not survive her illness, which finally led Chris Johansen to relent and stop fighting against Covid-19 restric-

JUST KIDDING, his wife died and he was at a rally of Anti-Vaxxers only a month later. Shame even her death couldn’t get him to find it in his heart to admit he was wrong and change.

Anyway, without his wife’s help running the family farm, Chris Johansen was left with no choice but to resign to go home and run it himself. Maine will be better off without him in the legislature, in any event.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Oh, WBEEEEEEEE....

GOP Rep Shrugs Off Nashville Shooting: ‘We Homeschool’ Our Daughter

Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) reacted to the horrific Nashville school shooting on Monday by essentially saying there’s nothing that can be done.

At the same time, he also offered up a perplexing and tone-deaf response when asked what he would do to protect young children, simply noting that he homeschools his daughter.

Speaking to reporters hours after a 28-year-old former student shot and killed six people at a private Christian school, Burchett contended that there were no solutions to the ongoing—and uniquely American—plague of mass shootings.

“Three precious little kids lost their lives, and I believe three adults, I believe, and the shooter of course, lost their life too,” he declared. “So, it’s a horrible, horrible situation. And, we’re not gonna fix it.”

[worstblogever]

Oh, WBEEEEEEEE....

GOP Rep Shrugs Off Nashville Shooting: ‘We Homeschool’ Our Daughter

I've profiled Rep. Burchett before for being a sasquatch-obsessed weirdo.

This... is darker, for sure.

[Tendrin]

Alarmed over young people increasingly proving to be a force for Democrats at the ballot box, Republican lawmakers in a number of states have been trying to enact new obstacles to voting for college students.

In Idaho, Republicans used their power monopoly this month to ban student ID cards as a form of voter identification.

But so far this year, the new Idaho law is one of few successes for Republicans targeting young voters.

Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times

Attempts to cordon off out-of-state students from voting in their campus towns or to roll back preregistration for teenagers have failed in New Hampshire and Virginia. Even in Texas, where 2019 legislation shuttered early voting sites on many college campuses, a new proposal that would eliminate all college polling places seems to have an uncertain future.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/republica...113821207.html

When you turn 18, you can vote! But only if the GOP lets you.

[shooshoomanjoe]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/republica...113821207.html

When you turn 18, you can vote! But only if the GOP lets you.

I don't get why people just don't get a state ID instead of arguing with the GOP.

[Tendrin]

I don't get why people just don't get a state ID instead of arguing with the GOP.

It can be incredibly hard to get one.

[shooshoomanjoe]

It can be incredibly hard to get one.

You just go to the DMV. It's not hard at all.