All-purpose news and politics thread: Two Steps Beyond!

[worstblogever]

Two years ago today we ran our profile of Jean Schmidt, who on the floor of the House in 2005, called House Rep. John Murtha, a 38 year career veteran of the Marine Corps a coward for calling for troops to be removed from Iraq, getting Democrats riled up enough to drown her out with boos. While she claimed she was just quoting a Marine who she spoke to at Arlington National Cemetery about Murtha, the Marine she named denied ever making such a statement. Among her other charming moments include denying that the Armenian genocide occurred, agreeing with constituents who were Birthers, and going to an elementary school where she went ahead and took it upon herself to teach a room full of six year olds about the word abortion. Schmidt also voted against the Lilly Ledbetter Act, voted against the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", voted against the Zadroga Act, falsely claimed "32 of 33 women who go to Planned Parenthood get an abortion", and when she misheard the Supreme Court's ruling on the Affordable Care Act and thought it was overturned, gleefully squealed in delight on the steps of the court. She truly earned her sobriquet. Since Schmidt's career fell apart in 2012 after voters in her district finally realized she was utterly heartless.



It was one year ago that “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” had its first profile of Janet Porter, a longtime anti-gay, anti-choice activist from Ohio who is an old pal of Michelle Bachmann who has written articles for the madhouse that is WorldNetDaily, (including the time where she discussed the Birther controversy surrounding President Obama). In the 2016 elections, Janet Porter has decided to take a crack at running for the Ohio State Senate, to challenge incumbent GOP State Senator Larry Obhof because he refused to sponsor a fetal heartbeat abortion ban bill (because it's highly unconstitutional and the courts would overturn it anyway). Her qualifications for the job are few, she was a former conservative media personality who would present insane conspiracy theories (like the one where she warned of President Obama using FEMA to “stifle dissent” or that there will be a criminal ban placed on Christianity, focusing in particular on finding ways to do so to protect gay rights, which she relates to being a “Pedophile Protection Act”. That last bit of paranoia also led her to work to create the documentary “Light Wins”, featuring several sitting Republican members of Congress. While Porter had a lot more sway back in say, 2007, her media profile diminished in 2010 after she became an obsessive Dominionist who would pray for God to take control of America’s media. That got her show cancelled on mainstream radio, so instead, she organizes wacky rallies and stunts like calling upon fetuses to testify in the Ohio House to try to get legislation as levelheaded as a fetal heartbeat bills passed, or work towards defunding Planned Parenthood, when she’s not also advocating for gay conversion therapy to be more widely utilized. Within the past FEW years, has compared the current “plight” of Christians in the United States to that of the Jews in Nazi Germany, likened gay marriage to slavery, compared fighting ISIS to trying to have abortion outlawed, claimed the End Times were upon us and the Great Flood was caused by God being angry about gay marriage a couple thousand years ago, and suggested that anti-gay Kentucky clerk Kim Davis should be considered as TIME Magazine’s “Person of the Year”.

Porter, as we hoped she might, lost in the 2016 GOP Primary against Larry Obhof handily, only getting 35% of the vote. She remains completely insane, however, and in August in 2016, told her fellow Christians that "God would hold them accountable" if they did not vote for Donald Trump for president. Apparently, according to Janet Porter, divine instruction on the 2016 election was provided in the Old Testament:

“God actually told us not to sit [out the election] when He gave us His voter guide in Deuteronomy. He said, ‘Choose life that you and your descendants may live.’ You might feel good about yourself sitting out this election, but I can assure you unborn babies won’t. The main choice set before us is life or death for millions.”

One the unthinkable actually happened, Porter predictably declared the candidate who lost the popular vote by 3 million votes but won the electoral college was due to "the mercy of God", and "a door of opportunity" to fulfill her dream of ending abortion. She then set back to work pissing off Ohio Republicans with her unconstitutional fetal heartbeat bill, saying she hoped it would pass so it would "outlaw abortion before the mother even knows she's pregnant". Because that doesn't sound like a fanatical or inherently manipulative of a motivation, at all.

Let's just hope Janet Porter continues to fail to win any office she runs for, and alienates Ohio Republicans for pushing for laws that are obviously going to get slapped down by the judiciary and waste taxpayer dollars. Sooner or later, she could (and should) be completely be shunned by her party.

[Spike-X]

either way its spending money I can't afford on something Im not using

Congratulations on being immune to all disease and impervious to all harm.

[jeanvaljean]

The Statue of Liberty has suffered a "temporary, unplanned outage", losing all lights apart from her crown and torch.

Women's March activists behind today's A Day Without A Woman Protest were quick to claim the black-out as "Lady Liberty... standing with the resistance."

But the National Parks Service has said the outage was simply due to construction work on a new emergency backup generator.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...-a7617336.html

So let's see... Lady Liberty protests Trump by going dark, a bald eagle attacked his hair plugs... But "patriot" #30 still did everything he could to get Trump elected.

[Tami]

It’s not easy for women to own land in India. One woman died fighting for hers.

SOHAGPUR, India — It was her land, she said, and she was tired of her uncle planting his wheat and grazing his cows on her property without paying rent.

So in April, Leena Sharma traveled from her home in New Delhi to her ancestral village in central India to confront her uncle, a powerful community leader. She planned to build a fence to keep him off her 37 acres — and eventually sell the property.

It was a bold move in a country where patriarchy remains deeply ingrained and where women have long been denied the legal right to own land. For Sharma, the consequences of asserting her property rights would prove deadly. First she disappeared. Then her half-naked corpse was found in a remote forest about six miles away.

India is a dangerous place for women.

[Tami]

Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: How to win in 2018 with the Unaffordable TrumpDoesn'tCare Act

You can't go wrong with a headline like that.

[Tami]

Lyda Krewson Wins The St. Louis Mayoral Race in Aparthied Fashion

It turned out to be a close race despite the predictions of the St. Louis pundit class. Lyda Krewson defeated St. Louis Treasurer Tishaura Jones by roughly two points. Lewis Reed finished a distant third, Antonio French forth, and the no-name nuisance candidates rounded out the field. What are the takeaways?

Need someone from the area to give more perspective on this.

[Tami]

Stranded Syrian doctor loses hope of returning to Brown University

Stranded in Turkey since January, Syrian physician Dr. Khaled Almilaji lost hope Monday that he will obtain a new student visa and return to finish his Brown University master's degree work in public health, given President Donald Trump's new revised travel ban.

Almilaji, 35, also holds out little hope of reuniting in the United States with his pregnant wife, Dr. Jehan Mouhsen, who is staying with friends in New York.

Instead, he may opt for "Plan B," reuniting with Mouhsen in Canada and pursing a Master of Health Informatics at the University of Toronto. He is waiting to hear on a scholarship.

Another loss for the U.S.

[Shining Trapezohedron]

All of the Russians tied to President Donald Trump, according to the dossier that American intelligence agencies corroborated and a former British MI6 agent compiled, are dropping dead.

Yet another Russian who was directly identified in the Donald Trump/Russia dossier have died under suspicious circumstances. Alex Oronov, the first of the list to be a citizen of the United States and a resident of Trump Hollywood, died two days ago. No details yet are available surrounding how he died, but it is reported that he was 69 years old and in good health.


Oronov was a Russian/Ukrainian/American who allegedly arranged the meeting between the Trump and Putin administrations where Putin was ensured no action would be taken against Russia over Crimea. It has been suggested that these details are what arrived on National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn’s shortly before he resigned.

This meeting is said to have taken place with a former Russian business partner of Trump’s, a Felix Sater. Michael Cohen, Trump’s attorney, and Andreii Artemenko, a pro-Russia Ukrainian, were also present according to some reports.

http://bipartisanreport.com/2017/03/...o-far-details/

-Someone- is aggressively cleaning house.

This is not just a smoking gun.

This is, at this point, also a lot of corpses filled with bullets shot FROM said gun.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

http://bipartisanreport.com/2017/03/...o-far-details/

-Someone- is aggressively cleaning house.

This is not just a smoking gun.

This is, at this point, also a lot of corpses filled with bullets shot FROM said gun.

No surprise there. Someone, namely Bad Vlad is tying up loose ends, making damn sure nothing in the Trump/Putin mess can be traced back to him. Anyone who thinks differently is naïve at best, foolish at worst.

[MindofShadow]

Congratulations on being immune to all disease and impervious to all harm.

Naw.

They just go to the ER when something bad happens, and can't afford it, driving up costs for everyone.

'Murica!

[Tami]

Shut down but not silenced: Isis play Homegrown demands to be staged

In 2015, the National Youth Theatre asked writer Omar El-Khairy and director Nadia Latif to create a show with its members about the radicalisation of young Muslims. Rehearsals for Homegrown began that summer with a sprawling cast. Around 70% of the script was already written, with the rest to be created through contributions from the cast. But halfway through the rehearsals period the production was abruptly cancelled; the NYT’s artistic director Paul Roseby cited a lack of quality and the need to protect the young people involved in the project.

There was no sign of a lack of quality at Conway Hall in London on Monday evening when an extract of the play was performed as part of An Inconvenient Muslim, an event organised by Index on Censorship to mark the publication of Homegrown that included a panel debate around the issues of censorship and representation of Muslims in society and the arts. There was no sign either of young people in need of protection from either challenging ideas or provocative theatre. Many of the original cast have stayed with the project over the last 20 months, and their commitment to it was demonstrated by electrifying performances of some scenes.

Cold feet, but the script is being published so maybe it will create some productive debate.

[Tami]

Scientists could end up flying blind about Arctic sea ice at the worst possible time

All is not well in the Arctic, where sea ice is in a long-term precipitous decline due to human-caused global warming. In February, for example, Arctic sea ice set a monthly record low, with sea ice extent coming in 455,600 square miles below the February 1981 to 2010 average.

That means that, at the end of February, the Arctic was missing an ice chunk the size of Texas, California and West Virginia combined, thanks to an unusually warm winter and long-term climate change.

That's a lot of missing sea ice.

To track sea ice trends, scientists have been using microwave sensors aboard Defense Department weather satellites that pass near the North Pole, but recent failures in key instruments plus delays in planning and launching next generation satellites means we may soon be flying blind in the Far North at the worst possible time.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado, which tracks sea ice trends, warned in a news release on Tuesday that satellite data gaps may soon cause sea ice observations to go dark for a few years. The specific timeframe they're concerned about is the period between now and 2023.

The reasons for the concern are a little wonky, but they amount to a combination of aging, increasingly unreliable sensors aboard current satellites, a Pentagon decision not to launch a replacement satellite for one that failed on Feb. 11, 2016, and the likelihood that no new satellite with the necessary hardware will be in orbit until 2023 at the earliest.

Probably won't help that the government is run by a gaggle of deniers.

[Tami]

Tim Kaine's son arrested after allegedly disrupting pro-Trump rally

Well, he has spunk. Just needs to redirect his energy to more productive uses.

(CNN)Linwood Michael Kaine, the son of Virginia senator and former vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine, was one of five protesters arrested for allegedly disrupting a pro-Donald Trump rally inside the Minnesota State Capitol Saturday, according to St. Paul Police spokesman Steve Linders.
Kaine, along with four others, allegedly chanted and lit fireworks inside the Capitol's rotunda shortly after the "March 4 Trump" rally began Saturday afternoon. The group fled and were apprehended by St. Paul police officers a few blocks away, Linders told CNN.
According to the "March 4 Trump" Facebook page, the rally was slated to begin at noon; Kaine's booking report from the Ramsey County Sheriff's Office shows he was arrested at approximately 12:20 p.m. CT.

Kaine, 24, was held in the Ramsey County Jail on suspicion of second-degree rioting but was released, Linders said.

Charges were not filed against Kaine or the four others arrested with him but the incident is still under investigation, according to Linders.

Asked to comment on Kaine's arrest, a spokeswoman for the senator and his wife would only say, "We love that our three children have their own views and concerns about current political issues. They fully understand the responsibility to express those concerns peacefully."

Linwood Kaine, who goes by "Woody," is the youngest son and second of Kaine and Anne Holton's three children. He was never on the campaign trail during the 2016 campaign, although his sister, Annella, appeared with at a few events and flew on the campaign plane.

The family's oldest son, Nat, a Marine, was deployed abroad just after Hillary Clinton named the Virginia senator as her running mate.

[Jackmando7]

Do any of you ladies who post on here plan on taking part in any of the marches / gatherings for International Woman's Day?

[Tami]

Do any of you ladies who post on here plan on taking part in any of the marches / gatherings for International Woman's Day?

Maybe I would if I could, but for personal reasons I can't. I fully support it as much as I can.