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

[Handsome men don't lose fights]

Jesus, White. His Black Panther review is, to borrow a turn of phrase from the dude, "Like, his opinion, man", but going off on those kids is a bridge too far for me. They were fucking hunted by a madman, why the hell wouldn't they go on the offensive against a permissive culture that offers a ready supply of thoughts and prayers, but won't lift a damn finger to prevent the next slaughter?

[worstblogever]

Hey WBE, get a load of this charmer. May be worth adding to the list...

Link above has the video referred to in the quote.

Dan Foreman has been in the CSGOPOTD for a few months... because it wasn't long ago that he had a very similar public freak out at constituents who tried talking to him at the Idaho state fair a few months back. He demanded the Fair apologize to HIM.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Calling Armond White scum would be an insult to scum.

[InformationGeek]

Dan Foreman has been in the CSGOPOTD for a few months... because it wasn't long ago that he had a very similar public freak out at constituents who tried talking to him at the Idaho state fair a few months back. He demanded the Fair apologize to HIM.

Sounds like someone has anger issues.

[worstblogever]

A Quinnipiac poll out today has generic Democrats favored by +15 over Republicans in November. Other questions asked in the poll shows 80% of the public remain in support of DACA Dreamers being allowed to stay, and that by the largest margin in the poll's history, 2 to 1, Americans support more being done on gun control.

Remind me again of which issue it was the GOP was going to use as a cudgel against Democrats in 2018? Because those have been the two "winners" some of our more delusional conservative posters have been looking at. Blue Wave's still coming, whether you accept it or not.

[Kevinroc]

Dem wins Kentucky state House seat in district Trump won by 49 points

http://thehill.com/homenews/state-wa...n-by-49-points

Kentucky Democrats on Tuesday reclaimed a rural district in the state House of Representatives that went heavily for President Trump in 2016.

Linda Belcher (D), a former state legislator who lost her seat in the Trump landslide in Kentucky, reclaimed the Bullitt County district by a more than two-to-one margin, defeating her GOP opponent Rebecca Johnson 68 percent to 32 percent.

[Tendrin]

Dem wins Kentucky state House seat in district Trump won by 49 points

http://thehill.com/homenews/state-wa...n-by-49-points

We're starting to see the correction to the conservative freak-out that gave us the Tea Party and Trump.

[Handsome men don't lose fights]

We're starting to see the correction to the conservative freak-out that gave us the Tea Party and Trump.

They've had eight years to prove they can provide a better government than what progressives were offering, and have proven not only to be bad at their jobs, but so utterly corrupt that I wouldn't trust them to tie a shoe string without direct supervision. I'm clicking my teeth and praying the blue wave comes to Indiana. SO MANY BASTARDS I want to see out of a job 'round here.

[Tendrin]

Our Revolution endorsed Kucinich? Like seriously?

[JCAll]

Hey WBE, get a load of this charmer. May be worth adding to the list...





Link above has the video referred to in the quote.

Wow, he dismissed people as murderers, then hashtagged it with BlueLivesMatter. Hilarious.

[worstblogever]

Three years ago today we ran our profile of Scott Beason, who was also a failed candidate for U.S. Senate in 2012, and a failed candidate for Congress to represent Alabama’s 6th Congressional District. Among Beason’s many controversial moments are the fact that he praised the Communist witch hunts of Senator Joe McCarthy, claiming that “they worked”, saying that the solution to the immigration crisis was for his party to “empty the clip and do what needs to be done”, and that he was recorded (while being aware he was recording) referring to African Americans as “Aborigines”. All those moments are bad enough to make you forget he’s also got a terrible voting record, including introducing legislation to try to ban the children of undocumented immigrants from taking part in after school activities, not just extracurricular sports or clubs… but even going to their prom. He also supported drug testing welfare recipients, TRAP laws to close all the abortion clinics in Alabama, a nullification measure to allow Alabama to ignore federal firearms laws, strict Voter ID laws, and voted against a measure that would have seen Alabama apologize to African Americans for slavery.

It was in both 2016, and in 2017, that “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” posted profiles about Isaac Latterell, who came to our attention as a reactionary, outspoken pro-life extremist after back in February of 2014 when he submitted a bill in the South Dakota state legislature that would have banned abortion at 7 weeks (in other words, a flagrantly unconstitutional bill that flew in the face of the Roe v. Wade ruling). At that time, he posted a blog to comment on the impending vote, tastefully titled, “Stop the Dismemberment of Living Children” in which, he compared abortion to “a veterinarian ripping the heads off puppies and crushing their skulls”, and gave his humble opinion that abortion doctors are more savage than “the barbarians of old”. After the talk of puppy decapitation and barbarians didn’t sway the public to his cause, and just shy of a year after his first rant about Planned Parenthood, Latterell penned a second screed, this time titled, “Planned Parenthood is worse than ISIS and Lying About It”. After being criticized for his rant, Latterell decided to back off just a tad, changing his article’s title to “Planned Parenthood is Beheading Children and Lying About It”, which is still devoid of facts. Laterrell then pitched a bill in the South Dakota House, HB 1230, that would “prohibit the beheading of certain living unborn children”, that predictably went nowhere. Now, this would be the most offensive issue that Isaac Latterell has ranted about, but just so everyone’s aware, he’s not a one-issue politician. Apparently, Latterell has some deep-seated fears about transsexuals, as he has voted for H1195, a bill that would limit a citizen’s gender identity to what is listed on their birth certificate, and in January 2016 voted for HB 1008, a transphobic bathroom cop bill to make sure that people use the bathroom designated for the gender types people are born. This is also reflected in his support through 2017 for a transphobic bathroom ban to be implemented in public schools, as well as a failed attempt at passing a “religious freedom” law to allow Christians the freedom to discriminate against same sex couples whose marriages threaten their “freedom”. While Latterell does remain in office, we will set aside his CSGOPOTD profile at this time and go ahead and take a look at a different wacky Republican today instead. (Current crazy/stupid scoreboard, is now 649-25, since this was established in July 2014.)

[worstblogever]

Rayne Brown

Welcome to the 649th original “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profile, where today, we’ll be talking about former North Carolina House of Representatives member Rayne Brown, who served in the Tar Heel state’s legislature from 2011-2016. She did so as a member of ALEC, the conservative group that brainstorms all manner of insanely extreme hard-right legislation around the country backing her (and later getting her help in trying to block renewable energy laws in North Carolina), as well as by way of having her campaign and the North Carolina GOP send out fliers during her 2010 campaign for office that made the Willie Horton ads from 1988 look like a walk in the park. Because it wasn’t just that the legislator in question that she was accusing of being soft on crime, Hugh Holliman, actually was alright enough with capital punishment that he had watched his daughter’s murderer be executed for the crime, but that Henry McCollum, one of the two supposed murderers that Holliman’s “weak on crime” stance would not be executed would be released from prison was, in reality, innocent of the crime that he was convicted. And that Holliman’s support for the Racial Justice Act would have easily aided in the wrongful execution of McCollum.

Well, after Rayne Brown took office and established several years’ worth of votes on some of the worst state-wide legislation in the nation (more on that in a minute), Brown also decided that it was wrong that the city of Ashville, North Carolina, could have women protesting Republicans’ policies by showing up topless, as it was legal. So she thought to remedy that with the small-government solution of making it not just a criminal offense for a woman in North Carolina to have her nipple exposed, but a FELONY OFFENSE. The bill she submitted to do so died in committee, mercifully, but not before Brown became notoriously nutty.

Then again, when a legislator is willing to take out editorials to scold liberals for being… y’know, liberal…

“You are acting as willful and petulant children deprived of a treat, impotently flailing their little arms and legs about. It seems that you liberals have been hoisted on the tip of your own petard, and you don’t like it one bit. Liberals are not content to effect change by convincing others of the rightness of their cause by the force of their arguments. Government has and continues to be the instrument by which they force the rest of us to concede to their vision of the world.”

You may now be imagining what her voting record is like, and odds are, the reality is worse than you think. Her fingerprints are all over some of the worst and most notorious bills from North Carolina during her tenure:

• April 11th, 2013: Rayne Brown votes for HB 392, another of those insane GOP bills that seek to drug test welfare recipients, then lose a state a ton of money on the cost of drug testing only to find no significant drug use until lawsuits against the laws succeed to prove the law is a violation of the 4th Amendment rights of those it seeks to test.
• June 5th, 2013: Brown votes for the Repeal of the Racial Justice Act.
• July 11th, 2013: Rayne Brown votes for SB 353, an extremely restrictive anti-abortion bill that was amended by the North Carolina GOP from a motorcycle safety bill into an anti-choice measure.
• July 25th, 2013: Brown votes for HB 589, one of several “stricter Voter ID laws” North Carolina Republicans push during her tenure aimed at suppressing the vote.
• June 3rd, 2015: Rayne Brown votes for HB 465, a TRAP law aimed at creating abortion regulations so restrictive that they would effectively force the closure of all abortion clinics in the state for failing to be able to meet them.
• June 11th, 2015: Brown votes for SB 2, a bill to allow state officials to refuse to perform “certain marriage duties” if they have a “sincerely held” religious objection.
• July 21st, 2015: Responding to the South Carolina state legislature voting to remove the Confederate flag from their state capitol after the mass murder of nine African Americans at the historical Charleston AME Church, Rayne Brown is one of several North Carolina Republicans who vote for SB 22, and to make it harder to remove Confederate monuments in North Carolina.
• March 23rd, 2016: Brown votes for HB 2, North Carolina’s disastrous anti-LGBT law, and boycotts over the law cost the state well over a trillion dollars of revenue from business boycotts and the tourism industry.

North Carolina was thrilled to learn only a few months into Rayne Brown’s third term in office that she announced that she would not be running for re-election. We’re not expecting her to return to elected office any time soon, and that’s a damned good thing.

[Tami]

http://www.pikecountycourier.com/app...assault-rifles

Sorry for the inelegance but I'm posting from my phone. Link is to story about church that seems to love assault rifles.

[Dalak]

http://www.pikecountycourier.com/app...assault-rifles

These people seem to me to be literally worshiping guns. This is new to me, and I've been born and raised in Texas so take that as you will.

[worstblogever]

These people seem to me to be literally worshiping guns. This is new to me, and I've been born and raised in Texas so take that as you will.

That's what made Vulcan so scary on American Gods. It seemed to explain the actual real world mentality of gun-nuts taking their own rhetoric as dogma.