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

[Dalak]

...so stealing this for my Pathfinder game.

Seems a more Roguish thing to do, but anyone can put points into Sleight of Hand I suppose.

I'm dead! You killed me. HAHAHAHAHA!!

Yet another foe falls to my +5 Keen Piercing Wit!

[Darkspellmaster]

I've been inspired to make my next D&D/Pathfinder character a Human Ranger named 'Bowyer Heed' with a racial hatred against Humans in your honor, I bow my head to you!

Can I borrow this for an NPC for my game?

[Dalak]

Can I borrow this for an NPC for my game?

Go ahead, anyone feel free to take the seed of my inspiration to grow into (hopefully) great story elements for your games!

E: All I request is a focus on Archery, a fascination with Elves that borders on the unhealthy, and/or for anyone taking the idea to share stories of how it works out.

[Darkspellmaster]

Meanwhile, while all you people are complaining and moaning about that stuff, the Republicans have reinstated their support for Roy Moore. Just, you know, FYI and so you don't get distracted.


Meanwhile, rape apologist and man who thinks semen cures depression (no seriously), Mike Cernovich got Sam Seder of MSNBC canned.



Funny how all of this stuff is happening around the same time, ain't it?

I have mixed feelings on this. First Cernovich is an Asshole who needs to get lost with his nutty crap.

But, and I say this with a sigh, while Seder was trying to be satirical with his tweet, it really wasn't funny. And if we're going to call out one person for this B.S. it has to be done for others. It was a dumb tweet, and he knew it enough to delete it. You would think that people would learn that when you tweet something and delete, it doesn't go away. People can find it and use it. Don't tweet things that can be used against you by scumbags.

[Darkspellmaster]

Go ahead, anyone feel free to take the seed of my inspiration to grow into (hopefully) great story elements for your games!

E: All I request is a focus on Archery, a fascination with Elves that borders on the unhealthy, and/or for anyone taking the idea to share stories of how it works out.

Of course, mind you said guy will be in a rather unusual setting, but I can work in the elves thing easy.

[Tendrin]

I just heard about the Sam Seder issue.

This is what I mean to the Left. The Left ALWAYS bows their heads to Conservatives for the littlest controversies. We DON'T defend our own.

Sam did nothng Wrong and Hayes didn't defend his friend AT ALL!

That isn't 'the left', though. That's MSNBC, a corporate media company that, like much of the corporate media, is afraid of the right and not afraid of the left. Look at the reaction of NYT's editors to the outrage of the Nazi story for more examples. The deed was done before 'the left' even had a chance to get angry about it (and they are now all over twitter).

For example:

The top editor at a small-town newspaper in Alabama said his office would be shot at if his publication endorsed GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore's opponent.
“I would have bullet holes in my windows,” Troy Turner, the top editor at the Opelika-Auburn News in eastern Alabama, said*during an interview with The Washington Post.
Instead of endorsing Moore's Democratic opponent, Doug Jones, the paper last month wrote that*"it’s time for Roy Moore to step aside for Alabama."

http://thehill.com/homenews/media/36...ndorsed-moores

[WestPhillyPunisher]

The RNC Will Support Roy Moore After Pulling Funding Over Misconduct Allegations

The move follows an endorsement from President Donald Trump. It's like I've said numerous times in this thread: "Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line". And with the GOP now fully behind Moore, it looks like Congress might soon have a predator in it's ranks. By the way....

**********

Moore Accuser Shares Evidence Of Relationship After Being Called A Liar

Debbie Wesson Gibson showed The Washington Post her high school scrapbook, which included a graduation card written by Moore. I expect Moore to hold a presser and say that card was a forgery. That's how Republicans roll, lie out the ass.

**********

‘They Cannot Hide From Him’: Democrats See Big Gains In Gubernatorial Races Under Trump

The stakes are high with redistricting battles on the horizon.

**********

Republican Leaders Say Helping Dreamers Isn’t An Emergency. For Many Dreamers, It Is.

An estimated 122 people lose Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals protections per day — even though Republicans insist they have until March to act. Short and sweet, from their inaction, Republicans don't care and will gleefully sit on their hands while Dreamers suffer.

**********

Donald Trump’s Typical McDonald’s Dinner Order Is A Calorific Nightmare

Such a juicy scoop. As someone who watches what I eat, eliminated junk food, not to mention hitting the gym twice a week, I'm surprised Trump, with his Michelin Man physique, hasn't had a heart attack yet when you compound his poor diet with the stress of being president.

[worstblogever]

Three years ago on this date, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" ran a profile of Charles Bishop, a former Alabama State Senator who lost his damned mind in the middle of the state senate and straight up went Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out on State Senator Lowell Barron, only regretting later that he didn’t take the fight outside and finish it. Bishop also regularly spoke in front of the white nationalist organization the Council of Conservative Citizens and was proud to oppose Alabama’s resolution to apologize to African Americans for slavery because “atonement equals reparations”. Bishop lost way back in the 2010 GOP Primary and hasn’t resurfaced in politics.


In both 2015, and in 2016, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” posted profiles of Vice President Mike Pence, who for a while, was considered to be an early establishment candidate for president that the Republican Party thought they would be able to rally behind in the 2016 elections. He was a sitting six-term Congressman from 2001 through 2012, establishing conservative bona fides without any scandals or major gaffes while winning elections comfortably. He actually won a 2010 Straw Poll at the Value Voters Summit where they thought he was their best choice to run against Barack Obama in 2012, but Pence opted instead to run for re-election as Governor of Indiana, and bide his time for what was to be a run in 2016. Then Gov. Pence, the insane true believer in the American culture wars that he is, went and signed Indiana's "religous freedom" law to allow for the legal discrimination of the LGBT community, then denied that the point of the bill was allowing discrimination (and making many send him the literal definition of "discrimination" since he seemed unable to understand it) and claiming he was incapable of discrimination because he once participated in an anniversary walk in Selma, Alabama. That only made critics note that during his time in the U.S. House, he actually campaigned on an agenda to "oppose any effort to recognize homosexual's as a 'discreet and insular minority' entitled to the protection of anti-discrimination laws similar to those extended to women and ethnic minorities," or that he called for “an audit to ensure that federal dollars were no longer being given to organizations that celebrate and encourage the types of behaviors that facilitate the spreading of the HIV virus" and instead, "Resources should be directed toward those institutions which provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior". If you’re unclear as to what that means, it’s that Pence wanted money redirected from AIDS clinics towards gay conversion therapy, which doesn’t actually work, and is considered a human rights violation. But that’s not all. Pence responded to the Matthew Shepherd Hate Crimes Act by making the ludicrous claim that it would allow intimidation towards or even charges to be filed against pastors who expressed a Biblical worldview critical to homosexuality, and also tried arguing that the 2010 repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” would, in his words, “weaken unit cohesion” of our military, and once voted for a Constitutional Amendment to define marriage as only between one man and one woman. Factor in the time Pence is awful enough to women that he voted against all equal pay legislation including the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, railed against the Disney cartoon Mulan for implying that women might be able to honorably serve in the military, and actually had an Indiana woman arrested for having a miscarriage because his obsession with cracking down on reproductive rights is that over-the-top insane.

We're talking that he voted for for the Terry Schiavo Incapacitated Persons Protection Bill extreme, here. We're saying that he was a sponsor of the legislation that tried to defund Planned Parenthood back in 2011, and his "evidence" of wrongdoing was a DIFFERENT doctored fraud of a video produced by friends of Breitbart News hacks like James O'Keefe than the one the Center for Medical Progress would drag into the spotlight four years later. Pence also compared the Supreme Court upholding the Affordable Care Act to 9/11, and in early 2015 decided state taxpayer dollars should be allocated towards “JustIN’, a state-run news service with two employees being paid $100,000 salaries to present a point of view where Mike Pence could do no wrong (cancelled after taxpayers called him out on wasting their money on him lying to them). Pence denied a link between smoking an cancer as late as 2001 (he was accepting money from the big tobacco lobby, of course), and denies climate change is a thing to this day.

So after Donald Trump decided that Mike Pence should be his running mate on the 2016 GOP ticket as his vice president. Although, he apparently tried reneging on the offer at the last minute. And then Trump botched the announcement and roll out to get the GOP hyped.

And then the campaign logo for the new ticket was openly mocked because THIS is what Trump's idea men came up with:


Pence spent most of the VP debate pretending Donald Trump didn't actually say all of the wildly deranged things he says out loud, and on social media, which was far better than the forgettable speech he gave at the RNC (he was clearly overshadowed by Ted Cruz telling people to "vote their conscience"). Maybe Pence's speech would have been better if he wasn't distracted by the inclusion of AIDS Activists in the proceedings.

And what a great campaigner Pence wasn't. When he couldn't help look like he was mildly aroused by the thought of, as he put it,
sending Roe v. Wade to the "ash heap of history". Hell, he even managed to take on some of Donald Trump's worst habits... like falling all over himself to not say disparaging things about white supremacist David Duke, or praising Vladimir Putin.

Heck, trying to defend Donald Trump isn't easy, like say when you have to spin how he isn't a fascist for talking about jailing his opponent during a presidential debate, but Pence was kept on his toes by girls as young as eleven years old trying to make excuses for Trump around the time the tape of him talking about "grabbing women by the p***y" hit.

And, in spite of Donald Trump being Trump, and Mike Pence being the coalesced nightmares of the LGBT community and women everywhere, they defied all the odds, and all the polling, and inexplicably won office. And then, suddenly, everyone finally got properly scared that with a Republican president, Republican House, and Republican Senate, that things like gay marriage, or reproductive rights would be fair game. Oh, and then they remembered that Mike Pence also has talked about wrecking Social Security, too. Or that he casually can talk about resuming a torture program at Guantanamo Bay Prison.

[worstblogever]

So maybe that's why we don't feel bad for Mike Pence when people donate to Planned Parenthood in his name (and still are), or the fact that he’s so afraid of women he won’t have dinner alone with one unless his wife is there (who he calls “Mother”), or when he showed up at a performance of Hamilton, and acts surprised when the audience boos him, or that he gets a lecture from a cast of minorities, gays, and even an HIV Positive lead actor to remind him that he's spent his whole career making legislative and executive decisions to slight anyone who wasn't a straight rich white male.

And then, our nightmare of 2017 continued to happen, and Mike Pence continued to be a witless turd throughout it. Where do we even begin with Pence? Let’s just hit the big points… by the end of the first month of the Trump administration, National Security Advisor Michael Flynn was fired, after several FBI investigations into the fact that he had been illegally operating was a foreign agent of other countries came to light. The official story about Flynn’s firing kept changing rapidly, including that Acting Attorney General Sally Yates got fired after hearing Mike Pence go on Fox News and give a story that seemed to indicate he wasn’t aware of Michael Flynn’s activities. Also, he assured the public that no one in the Trump campaign was talking to Russians. Well, as of December 1st, 2017, we know Mike Pence was just deliberately lying, as he is prone to doing, and he knew about Michael Flynn talking to Russians under the radar. In fact, per Flynn’s testimony to Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Pence and Jared Kushner directed Gen. Flynn to do that specifically.

This would be similar to how back in October of 2016, Mike Pence went over to Fox News for an interview/tongue bath and scoffed at the idea that the Trump campaign had any communication with anyone from Wikileaks. Except, y’know, we now know that for almost the entire campaign, Donald Trump, Jr. was talking to Wikileaks, and was even getting advice on which of their stories the Trump campaign should share more on social media.

This isn’t to say that all Mike Pence did was alternate between lying and hiding all year. He still surfaced to waste taxpayer dollars to do things like try to defeat Kim Jong Un’s regime by impotently staring angrily at the Korean DMZ or the time he attended a Colts game with the intention of angrily storming out if anyone protested by kneeling during the national anthem. The only thing he knows how to do right is play fetch, and chase after Donald Trump to remind him to sign the executive orders that dementia prevents him from remembering to sign. Y'know, when Trump's not finding it hilarious about how apparently the Vice President wants to execute gay people by hanging.

We could go on forever, but frankly, Mike Pence is, simply, a disingenuous sack of mayo who we’re feeling more and more relieved that will not end up taking the place of Donald Trump as president when he’s inevitably impeached… Pence is going to get flushed out with him.

[aja_christopher]

Trump won

...the Republican nomination and that's the fact that you seem to want to avoid accepting: like it or not, he was the Republican nominee and is now the Republican President.

You can't sit here and try to extol the "good" of your party while taking little to no responsibility for the bad -- and as I pointed out before, this isn't just about Trump, especially given the fact that the last Republican administration was exponentially worse than Trump up to this point. In fact, we'd be fortunate if this is as bad as Trump gets in comparison.

Stop trying to deflect to "Trump" every time I point out that things like racism, sexism, homophobia (etc) seem to be a problem with the Republican party as whole -- Trump wouldn't even be able to appeal to such a wide swath of Republicans if they didn't already agree with a lot of his ideologies to begin with (such as racism, sexism, homophobia, etc).

You keep trying to make this all about Trump even as I point out the fact that past Republicans like Bush, Cheney and Rumsfield -- and current Republicans like Sessions, Bannon and Moore -- are equally problematic, if not more so.

Even with regards to Trump you seem to want to act as if he is some "exception" when he is just the natural result of the anti-Obama "birther" movement that took root in the Republican party long before he became the nominee: all he did was campaign on the racist, sexist, Islamophobic (etc) template that was laid out for him beforehand -- and it says a lot about said party that such behavior is what helped him secure the win.

I understand the need to defend your party but you're being openly disingenuous here in acting as if Trump is the main problem with the current Republican administration: again -- the Republican party is the issue at hand here, and Trump is simply the natural result of a political party whose sole goal is to win by any means necessary, whether "moral" or otherwise.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

I understand the need to defend your party but you're being openly disingenuous here in acting as if Trump is the main problem with the current Republican party: again -- the Republican party is the issue at hand here, and Trump is simply the natural result of a political party whose sole goal is to win by any means necessary, whether "moral" or otherwise.(

And we're seeing that ugliness at work with Trump and the GOP now fully supporting known pedophile and predator Roy Moore for no other reason than they need him to win to maintain their slim majority in Congress. They clearly don't give even half a shit about Moore's revolting indiscretions, they just want him to win at any cost. Any talk of morality with Republicans left the station a very long time ago, and their now full throated support of Moore clinched that.

[aja_christopher]

And we're seeing that ugliness at work with Trump and the GOP now fully supporting known pedophile and predator Roy Moore for no other reason than they need him to win to maintain their slim majority in Congress. They clearly don't give even half a shit about Moore's revolting indiscretions, they just want him to win at any cost. Any talk of morality with Republicans left the station a very long time ago, and their now full throated support of Moore clinched that.

I'd argue that it left with Nixon and was then completely demolished under Bush.


https://www.dailykos.com/stories/201...ump-Appointees

Trump -- and Moore -- are just dancing in the rubble at this point.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

I'd argue that it left with Nixon and was then completely demolished under Bush.



Trump -- and Moore -- are just dancing in the rubble at this point.

Let's not forget Saint Ronnie with the unholy mess that was Iran-Contra and his willful intolerance and dismissal (at Nancy's behest I've heard) of the AIDS epidemic which started on his watch. Of course, his enablers and loyal revisionists will argue that Reagan was already in the grip of Alzheimer's at the time and didn't know what he was doing, something I've always called bullshit on.

[aja_christopher]

Let's not forget Saint Ronnie with the unholy mess that was Iran-Contra and his willful intolerance and dismissal (at Nancy's behest I've heard) of the AIDS epidemic which started on his watch. Of course, his enablers and revisionists will argue that Reagan was already in the grip of Alzheimer's at the time and didn't know what he was doing, something I've always called bullshit on.

The report I linked to below the image goes into more detail on all of that -- and even without those convictions, the facts still speak for themselves.



Anyone who tries to argue that Trump is an "exception" to the otherwise "moral" Republican base is deluding themselves -- if anything, he's doing better than the "average" Republican-led administration... thus far.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

The report I linked to below the image goes into more detail on all of that -- and even without those convictions, the facts still speak for themselves.



Anyone who tries to argue that Trump is an "exception" to the otherwise "moral" Republican base is deluding themselves -- if anything, he's doing better than the "average" Republican-led administration... thus far.

That's only because Mueller is still working on the indictments which haven't caught up to Trump yet. If everything that's been said and written about the Trump campaign's dalliance with Russia turns out to be true, Orange Foolius could surpass Dubya in a short time.