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

[Tendrin]

Hey, look. The Texas house is being... well.. the Texas House.

Texas is moving toward*a plan that could see women*buy*insurance coverage for abortions after*a House vote derided by critics as “ridiculous and cruel.” The GOP-controlled House voted 95-51 Tuesday*in favor of restricting abortion coverage in health insurance, under a rule that would ban coverage in private health insurance and force women to pay an additional supplement if they want coverage for the procedure.
If House Bill 214 is enacted, it will come into force at the beginning of December this year. It*makes no allowances for women*who have abortions after being victims of rape or incest, Reuters reported.
“Women and parents will be faced with the horrific decision of having to purchase ‘rape insurance’*to cover them if they are victimized,” Democratic Representative Chris Turner said in a statement. “This is not only ridiculous, but it is cruel,” he added.

http://www.newsweek.com/texas-votes-...surance-649548

[InformationGeek]

Alt-Right protest was going on at Charlottesville and it's creepy.

[JCAll]

Hey, look. The Texas house is being... well.. the Texas House.

http://www.newsweek.com/texas-votes-...surance-649548

"I wasn't going to get an abortion, but since I'm already paying for it I might as well!"

[Tazirai]

Hey, look. The Texas house is being... well.. the Texas House.



http://www.newsweek.com/texas-votes-...surance-649548

Why do Conservative men of all religions feel they can control Women?
Your books from 2000 years ago were written by people who didn't have Science to inform them of the world.
Why do you want people beholden to your Worldviews?

[Tendrin]

Alt-Right protest was going on at Charlottesville and it's creepy.

Creepy and violent.

[Tami]

Scott Pruitt Is Carrying Out His E.P.A. Agenda in Secret, Critics Say

WASHINGTON — When career employees of the Environmental Protection Agency are summoned to a meeting with the agency’s administrator, Scott Pruitt, at agency headquarters, they no longer can count on easy access to the floor where his office is, according to interviews with employees of the federal agency.

Doors to the floor are now frequently locked, and employees have to have an escort to gain entrance.

Some employees say they are also told to leave behind their cellphones when they meet with Mr. Pruitt, and are sometimes told not to take notes.

Mr. Pruitt, according to the employees, who requested anonymity out of fear of losing their jobs, often makes important phone calls from other offices rather than use the phone in his office, and he is accompanied, even at E.P.A. headquarters, by armed guards, the first head of the agency to ever request round-the-clock security.

Together with a small group of political appointees, many with backgrounds, like his, in Oklahoma politics, and with advice from industry lobbyists, Mr. Pruitt has taken aim at an agency whose policies have been developed and enforced by thousands of the E.P.A.’s career scientists and policy experts, many of whom work in the same building.

“There’s a feeling of paranoia in the agency — employees feel like there’s been a hostile takeover and the guy in charge is treating them like enemies,” said Christopher Sellers, an expert in environmental history at Stony Brook University, who this spring conducted an interview survey with about 40 E.P.A. employees.

Mr. Pruitt’s penchant for secrecy is reflected not just in his inaccessibility and concern for security. He has terminated a decades-long practice of publicly posting his appointments calendar and that of all the top agency aides, and he has evaded oversight questions from lawmakers on Capitol Hill, according to the Democratic senators who posed the questions.

His aides recently asked career employees to make major changes in a rule regulating water quality in the United States — without any records of the changes they were being ordered to make. And the E.P.A. under Mr. Pruitt has moved to curb certain public information, shutting down data collection of emissions from oil and gas companies, and taking down more than 1,900 agency webpages on topics like climate change, according to a tally by the Environmental Defense Fund, which did a Freedom of Information request on these terminated pages.

William D. Ruckelshaus, who served as E.P.A. director under two Republican presidents and once wrote a memo directing agency employees to operate “in a fishbowl,” said such secrecy is antithetical to the mission of the agency.

[mojotastic]

Honestly? He probably saw something about it on TV and just decided to comment.

Well he did comment about Venezuela and Cuba during the race saying that he something about being oppose to the oppresive goverment in those countries.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2014, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” published its original profile of Liz Cheney, the carpet-bagging daughter of former Vice-President Dick Cheney who after spending several years during President Obama’s first term as a Fox News Correspondent fomenting fear and anger towards Muslims to try and justify bigotry towards Muslim Americans, the use of torture in the War on Terror, and to keep our troops in combat in the Middle East, even if it means going to war into completely new quagmires there. She has defended the paranoid ramblings of Birther conspiracy theorists, rallied against the “Ground Zero Mosque” (that was actually an Islamic cultural center located blocks away), and had said that Republican obstructionism of any Democratic effort to do anything was “patriotism”. But the real comedy started once Liz Cheney challenged Senator Mike Enzi, where her campaign took one disastrous turn after another, from being caught falsifying information on her Wyoming hunting license application (to try and make it look like she was a resident for longer than she was), having her husband caught on voter rolls in both Virginia and Wyoming, when she attacked the print media for investigating her carpet-bagging by saying, “newspapers are dying, and that’s not a bad thing”, to ending up feuding with her own sister-in-law on Facebook after she reversed her stance on gay marriage. It was a comedy of errors. When we first created our Liz Cheney entry, we wondered if she would ever re-emerge to try for another run in politics. A year passed, and we had no new updates in 2015… but now, in 2016, she is in fact won the right to represent Wyoming’s At-Large seat in the U.S. House, going on to participate in every partisan-line vote with the GOP, and celebratre the firing of James Comey by Donald Trump (Hint: It’s not a good thing, Liz.) Her profiles now get posted on June 26th of every year, and there are the links to our 2016 and 2017 updates on the spawn of Dick Cheney.

[worstblogever]

Many sane Americans are now dreadful. And by that, we mean people are filled with dread. For in 2015, we first profiled Donald Trump, weeks after his announcement that he was running for president, and we hoped that his long, long personal history of being a racist, misogynist, pathological liar, complete fraud as a businessman, and utter piece of garbage who was running on a campaign platform that amounted to, “Mexicans are rapists” at the time would not become the Republican nominee for president. That seemed evidenced pretty well by the times he was caught pretending to be his own publicist leaking stories to the media in the 1990s, his numerous Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings, his wide swath of failed business ventures like running the USFL into the ground, Trump Steaks, Trump Airlines, Trump Vodka, or Trump University. Or that the first time his name appears in a newspaper, anywhere, it’s when he and his father were charged with the Justice Department for racial discrimination in housing. Or the time he wanted a Native American casino’s tax exempt status revoked, and went before Congress to declare “they don’t look Indian to me.” Or his obsession with Barack Obama’s birth certificate or college transcripts. Or the time he called for the death sentence to be carried out upon the Central Park Five (who were exonerated of any crime).

Trump was the literal inspiration for cartoon villains through most of the 1990s, because he’s a s***ty enough human being that it makes complete sense. But then, in 2016, as we updated his profile three months before election day, we were filled with even more dread, knowing that after a long GOP Primary where he took American politics all the way into the gutter to the extent where he had to reassure everyone during a presidential debate that his penis wasn’t tiny, and pandered to the worst aspects of the Alt-Right… we watched in terror as he made himself the center piece of the most egomaniacal, bigoted, fascist display of a candidate you’ll see outside of the third act of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”…we dreaded even the statistical possibility in the final run-up to election day that Trump even could mathematically win. Most pollsters had the odds stacked far against Trump going into Election Day, however…

November 8th, 2016 is a day that will live in infamy, as with the help of the nation of Russia and its own kleptocracy, with a system of voter suppression set in place by the Republican Party to help their odds, in spite of a candidate who marred our politics not just by racism and sexism, but utter ignorance of facts who was trounced in debates by a far superior stateswoman… Donald Trump eked out an electoral college victory by winning two states by about 70,000 votes.

We f***ed up, America. We f***ed up bad. And by “we”, we’re of course referring to the minority of voters who even bothered to vote.

Our rundown of Donald Trump had so many moments of stupidity, insanity, bigotry, ignorance, sexism, and proto-fascism that we made a timeline long enough that it wouldn’t even fit into one post on any forum we could find. On Dailykos, we managed to cram his activities into a post that reviewed everything known about Trump from his birth to when the transition into the anxiety-trigger that is the Trump Administration began. And honestly, at that point, depression hit. CSGOPOTD… this blog covers the Crazy/Stupid of the Republican Party, but keeping track of everything Donald Trump has to offer day in and day out… that’s a lot to take on. We couldn’t keep updating that timeline every day, because if we had, there would have been no time left to discuss the rest of the party. Which, make no mistake, is still quite bats*** crazy these days, itself. But we’ve now tried to go back and review all the crazy that happened since we last updated the Trump timeline, to see how sad things have really become.

You’re probably hearing a lot about the Trump campaign having contact with Russians during the election, and how they were eager to get compromising material from Russian hackers about Hillary Clinton. Which, y’know, is illegal to the point where it’s potentially treason. And you probably know about how while the confirmed crime of Russian hacking was being potentially traced back to the Trump campaign, that Trump responded by firing the FBI director, James Comey. Which led to a special prosecutor, Robert Mueller, being named, and now Trump is s***ting his pants at the prospect that he and several members of his family and their extended campaign staff could face jail time. You probably have also heard about how members of his Cabinet were either completely unqualified to run the agencies they were placed in charge of, or in some cases, were individuals who were outright antagonistic towards the departments they were granted authority over, or in a few instances were tied to White Nationalist and Neo-Nazi groups. You may have heard about Trump leaking Israeli state secrets to Russian Spymasters, or blurting out the secret locations of American submarine locations to foreign leaders. You probably heard about “covfefe”. You likely know about his bigoted call for a “Muslim ban” and how his own words caused the courts to overturn the executive order that would have brought it about. You could have also heard about his penchant for climbing up into whatever big truck is pulled up near the White House for him to play in like a child in a Tonka truck. You are likely to have heard his impotent, incessant calls for a wall to be built on the U.S. Mexico border that keeps growing in size, but changing in its opaqueness because of drug dealers throwing over sixty pound bags of drugs than can hit you in the head. You may remember the time he assembled his entire Cabinet for a public meeting just for the purpose of forcing them to say nice things about him. You also probably heard about Cabinet members and White House staff getting fired in record time. You may remember any of his embarrassing meetings with world leaders, from refusing to shake the hand of Angela Merkel, objectifying the First Lady of France directly in front of her husband and his own wife, being an utter disappointment to Pope Francis, shoving the prime minister of Montenegro out of the way so he could be in the front for the cameras, and the mysterious “orb” photo from Saudi Arabia. You might remember the time he announced an executive order and then left the room, forcing Mike Pence to chase after him with it so he could sign it. There’s almost no way you don’t remember something s***ty he posted on Twitter, at some point, whether it was lying about the size of his inauguration crowd, talking about starting up a nuclear arms race again, calling the most decorated actress in American cinema history, Meryl Streep, “overrated”, demanding an apology from the cast of Hamilton because their audience booed Mike Pence, or say, the time he declared the media “the enemy of the people”. You are likely to remember when he tried to ban transgender troops from the military by just posting an announcement on Twitter without first mentioning he was going to do it to the Pentagon, and forcing them to ignore it because you don’t issue orders on Twitter. You may have heard of the rumors from White House aides about him screaming at televisions for having the nerve to report on any or all of the things we just mentioned, because he’s that petulant. There’s… so… much to cover. Like, there isn’t even a DAILY story breaking about scandal, or outrageous comments. This motherf***er is a shotgun blast of “What the f*** is wrong with you?” pellets that you can’t dodge if you tried.

[worstblogever]

We knew he was a cartoon villain. He showed us how s***ty he was for his entire time in the public consciousness, both as a businessman and as a human being. We knew. Then he spent 16 months campaigning for president, and no matter how out of his element he looked, there were motherf***ers in the GOP insisting he’d “pivot” and become “presidential”. They expected the oldest person ever elected to the office of presidency, in spite of losing the popular vote by 3 million votes, would suddenly, magically become a lovable grandpa like Ronald Reagan (who was also a s***ty presisdent, anyway). We knew Reagan had dementia in his second term, and ignored it, yet when we had a narcisstic, tempermental child with a family history of Alzheimer’s disease and obvious signs of mental illness and/or mental impairment, came along they were willing to give him the launch codes. We now have a president that, were he a character on Game of Thrones, he would be the often-referenced Mad King Aerys.

And so, we’ve been graced with the most incompetent presidency in modern history, and we’re not even seven months in. Trump is already under federal investigation, and impeachment is a word that’s been bandied about by members of both parties. After spending months whining about how much time President Obama spent golfing (which wasn’t actually that much), he’s hitting the links virtually every weekend, spending one quarter of his days in office hitting the links. Even after he attacked opponents in the GOP Primary and general election for “not having enough stamina”, he’s demanding a golf cart pick him up while he’s on diplomatic trips, and he’s sleeping in on summits with world leaders and sending his daughter and her resume of being a knock-off designer shoe manufacturer to serve as head of state in his stead. His approval ratings are the lowest for any president since regular approval rating polls began being taken for presidents in the Truman administration, and getting lower all the time (now as low as 33% in Quinnipiac, and Rasmussen even has him below 40%, lower than they had Barack Obama at any point in his presidency). He’s making George W. Bush (43) look like an effective leader, which is f***ing unimaginable only a few years ago. His own first lady is publicly swatting him away because even she is disgusted with him, and not afraid to show it. His only achievement in office that hasn’t been overturned by the courts is helping the GOP hustle Neil Gorsuch onto the Supreme Court, and being more embarrassing than any chief executive this country has ever known.

When you peer at the full timeline… everything, everything at once, you want to curl in the fetal position and lay low to just hope and pray someone invokes the 25th Amendment or the GOP wise up and get the cojones to realize they shouldn’t be propping up this bigoted, conspiracy peddling twit anymore for the good of the whole nation. The only part of the country succeeding right now are Wall Street bankers and liquor store owners profiting from how sane people have been driven to drink heavily until this blows over. We are at best, living in the Twilight Zone, and at worst, totally f***ed, and if he’s not removed from office, potentially f***ed beyond all repair.

Anyway, you get the idea, and rather than just keep dropping incidental evidence… here’s a full timeline of everything we had ever written about Donald Trump, including the past 9 months since the election about the marmalade-tinged plague upon the earth, broken down for your reading pleasure. May God have mercy on our souls, and if you’re an atheist, may modern science and reason lead us from his ignorance. And never stop fighting against this. We will get through this. We will survive this. Always… Resist.

Trump Timeline: Part One- Beginnings Prior to Running for Office
Trump Timeline: Part Two- Seeking the 2016 GOP Nomination
Trump Timeline: Part Three- The Build to Election Day 2016
Trump Timeline: Part Four- The Trump Transition
Trump Timeline: Part Five- Trump Administration’s First 100 Days
Trump Timeline: Part Six- Trump Administration Day 101-200

[Malvolio]

Voting rights should not even be a thing anymore. If you are born in this country. You should be automatically registered to vote. Once you hit legal age, then you can choose to remove yourself from the rolls, and choose affiliation. That simple.

The only people who should have to contend with voting issues should be new Citizens in Waiting.

Voting should be a holiday for the weekend, and legally tallied AFTER the state with the last polling station closes.
Meaning California polls close, then the tallies are made public.

Popular vote only. No Electoral College.

Disctrict rezoning should be done by outside parties. No one Affiliated with the party in question. The goal is to seek balance, without undue advantage for the others.

But sometimes Neither party cares about Democracy in regards to this.

Two things:

1. California? What about Alaska and Hawaii?

2. Whom would those outside parties consist of, to do the redistricting?

[SquirrelMan]

My, my! Red Grant certainly has been busy. His diet sure is interesting though.

The "what I ate" section on that page has replaced Instagram as part of my daily online routine.

And I really want to try some of those breakfast choices.

[SquirrelMan]

Creepy and violent.

But they look so neat and well dressed!

I can't wait on the articles about their hair styles and fashion choices.

[SquirrelMan]

The word "Nazi" is trending on twitter.

And Seb Gorka hasn't even been in the news for 48 hours.

[PaulBullion]

Spoilers for Captain America 25:

spoilers:

It's quite chilling when the opening pages show a Nazi bastard who tricked the American people into trusting him and putting him in power suggests war with two separate nations and that is exactly what's happening in the news right now. It's a bit like that time an issue of Wonder Woman came out with the headline "Princess Diana is Dead" in the same month Diana Spencer died.

end of spoilers