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

[worstblogever]

Well, we really need to at least set up a 'WBEBooze Fund', then.

One of these days I should get a patreon for a lot of reasons...

But I would feel bad using it to pay for just booze. Paying off the mortgage might make more sense.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, as well as 2019, that "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" published profiles of U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, who as a member of the U.S. House, voted against equal pay for women multiple times, insisting that “women don’t want it”. She’s also a co-sponsor of the “Birther Bill”, denies that Mitt Romney ever passed a healthcare program in Massachusetts, and gave an infamous interview where she falsely claimed that the Affordable Care Act (which she also was a part of the “lie of the year” at Polifiact, predicting it would lead to death panels) was a violation of HIPAA, and when asked repeatedly to explain how that’s even possible, she just kept repeating the same falsehood robotically without actually providing any logical answer. She was also a big proponent of the 2013 Government Shutdown, and on the day it began, went on FOX and Friends to optimistically predict that it would actually teach ordinary Americans about all the “big government” ideas that were being defunded that they can do without (which the opposite actually happened over the 16 day stretch). Our update on Blackburn continued covering her hyper-conservative voting record, as well as the fact that she spoke at the South Carolina Freedom Summit and claimed Christians were a persecuted minority in the United States. When reporters followed up on her remarks and asked her to name an example of such persecution, she failed to be able to cite a single one. Marsha Blackburn was also particularly awful during the GOP's witch hunt after the Center for Medical Progress released their deceitful smear of Planned Parenthood, insisting that after all investigations had been concluded that Planned Parenthood had still been caught "selling baby body parts", and during the paranoia around the affair, attempted to use the House Intelligence Committee's investigation as a means to demand a complete list of every medical students, residents, or other medical personnel around the country who have ever participated in an abortion, because there's no way that such a thing would enable domestic terrorists in the radical anti-choice movement to assassinate those people (when they already have done so).

Through 2017, continued to make the rounds on cable news and with the media, where she can do things like insinuate that James Comey is a liar to help provide cover for Donald Trump while he’s investigated for accepting help from the Russians to get elected in exchange for dropping sanctions against them, or when she can be one of the few politicians who actually defended Donald Trump’s spur of the moment decision to ban transgender soldiers from the military before he ever consulted the Pentagon about what kind of impact that might have. Make no mistake, she’s “all-in” on the Trump administration, and with any luck, she might get swept away with it at some point. Maybe when she was caught in the middle of the NRA/Russia connection, someone should have thrown a flag.

After she started catching some serious hell at her town halls in 2017, where she’s been raucously booed and openly been accused of lying, she responded to that treatment by going on CNN a week later to claim that the people who booed her weren’t actually from her district. The usually passive Wolf Blitzer fact-checked her on, pointing out that people had to show ID to prove they were from her district to get into the building in the first place.

Marsha Blackburn takes advantage of how red of a state Tennessee is, winning election to ther U.S. Senate to replace the retiring Sen. Bob Corker in 2018 with 55% of the vote. While of late, the majority of our CSGOPOTD updates on U.S. Senators note that they’re keeping their mouths shut, and are trying to just discreetly rubber-stamp whatever nominees the Trump administration puts in front of them, regardless of how terrible of people they are, or how wildly unqualified they are for the job (which make no mistake, Marsha Blackburn has begun doing that as a Senator)…

We’re also going to note that Marsha Blackburn unilaterally blocked a bill in the Senate that would have required any presidential campaign that receives offers of assistance from an agent of a foreign government to report it to the FBI, opening the door for Russia to assist the 2020 Trump campaign the way they did in 2016. (And at least a dozen GOP Congressional candidates also accepted help from Russian hackers, per the Mueller report). This should come as little surprise, though, because Blackburn knows exactly how deep Trump is in it with Russia… after all, she was on the Trump transition team. She deemed the bill, submitted by Mark Warner, as “over-broad” and that “it should be done in a bipartisan way” even though outside of Blackburn, it had unanimous support. And that Warner offered to allow her to suggest how to amend it to make it not “over-broad” or “more bipartisan”, however the hell she assumes to interpret those words.

In January of 2020, Sen. Blackburn was predictably among the Republican senators who voted against allowing witnesses in the impeachment trial for Donald Trump, thereby making it a “trial”, and then voted to acquit him after said “trial” in spite of the mountain of evidence that he tried to solicit foreign aid in the 2020 elections from Ukraine by threatening to withhold aid from them.

For all the effort she put towards doing that, she’s been mostly twiddling her thumbs to do anything to help the country survive the economic impact of the coronavirus since passing the original stimulus bill back in March. She saves all of her energy for lashing out at the media for daring to fact-check her habitually lying ass, like the did after her fib-filled speech at the 2020 RNC.

And the country will be stuck with her in the Senate until 2024. Just… great. Great.

[Tendrin]

One of these days I should get a patreon for a lot of reasons...

But I would feel bad using it to pay for just booze. Paying off the mortgage might make more sense.

I mean, a patreon for your efforts isn't terrible. You've put a LOT of work into this.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

I mean, a patreon for your efforts isn't terrible. You've put a LOT of work into this.

I agree. WBE brought a wealth of knowledge to the Politics thread by shining a much needed light on all those Republican scumbags.

[Mister Mets]

Man, you Americans have to get a grip on your forest fires, I can't even see around the block up here the smoke is so bad.

Time to vote for a President who doesn't believes global warming and covid is a hoax. (and doesn't pack stadiums without people wearing masks)

Renewable energy is so capitalist, do you know how much profit and investment is to be made in solar and wind power. Time for the President who stuck in 1970's to pack his suitcase and go, so the country can move forward.

Unfortunately, nuclear power, one of the main alternatives to fossil fuels as a source of cheap energy, is unpopular with voters.

https://morningconsult.com/2020/09/0...nergy-polling/

1 in 3 adults think the U.S. should keep current nuclear plants online but not build any new facilities. 16% believe the U.S. should keep existing nuclear plants operational and build new reactors. This comes to under half of Americans who don't think we currently have too much nuclear power.

29% view nuclear energy favorably and 49% view it unfavorably, although there is a significant percentage with no opinion.

It is worth noting that the primary reason the fires get so bad is poor land management

https://www.propublica.org/article/t...anybody-listen

The pattern is a form of insanity: We keep doing overzealous fire suppression across California landscapes where the fire poses little risk to people and structures. As a result, wildland fuels keep building up. At the same time, the climate grows hotter and drier. Then, boom: the inevitable. The wind blows down a power line, or lightning strikes dry grass, and an inferno ensues. This week we’ve seen both the second- and third-largest fires in California history. “The fire community, the progressives, are almost in a state of panic,” Ingalsbee said. There’s only one solution, the one we know yet still avoid. “We need to get good fire on the ground and whittle down some of that fuel load.”

Yes, there’s been talk across the U.S. Forest Service and California state agencies about doing more prescribed burns and managed burns. The point of that “good fire” would be to create a black-and-green checkerboard across the state. The black burned parcels would then provide a series of dampers and dead ends to keep the fire intensity lower when flames spark in hot, dry conditions, as they did this past week. But we’ve had far too little “good fire,” as the Cassandras call it. Too little purposeful, healthy fire. Too few acres intentionally burned or corralled by certified “burn bosses” (yes, that’s the official term in the California Resources Code) to keep communities safe in weeks like this.

Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres. The state passed a few new laws in 2018 designed to facilitate more intentional burning. But few are optimistic this, alone, will lead to significant change. We live with a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire.

There are all sorts of regulations that make controlled burns difficult to implement.

Cal Fire pays firefighters well, very well. (And perversely well compared with the thousands of California Department of Corrections inmates who serve on fire crews, which is very much a different story.) As the California Policy Center reported in 2017, “The median compensation package — including base pay, special pay, overtime and benefits — for full time Cal Fire firefighters of all categories is more than $148,000 a year.”

The paydays can turn incentives upside down. “Every five, 10, 15 years, we’ll see an event where a firefighter who wants [to earn] overtime starts a fire,” said Crystal Kolden, a self-described “pyrogeographer” and assistant professor of fire science in the Management of Complex Systems Department at the University of California, Merced. (She first picked up a drip torch in 1999 when working for the U.S. Forest Service and got hooked.) “And it sort of gets painted as, ‘Well, this person is just completely nuts.’ And, you know, they maybe are.” But the financial incentives are real. “It’s very lucrative for a certain population of contractors.”

By comparison, planning a prescribed burn is cumbersome. A wildfire is categorized as an emergency, meaning firefighters pull down hazard pay and can drive a bulldozer into a protected wilderness area where regulations typically prohibit mountain bikes. Planned burns are human-made events and as such need to follow all environmental compliance rules. That includes the Clean Air Act, which limits the emission of PM 2.5, or fine particulate matter, from human-caused events. In California, those rules are enforced by CARB, the state’s mighty air resources board, and its local affiliates. “I’ve talked to many prescribed fire managers, particularly in the Sierra Nevada over the years, who’ve told me, ‘Yeah, we’ve spent thousands and thousands of dollars to get all geared up to do a prescribed burn,’ and then they get shut down.” Maybe there’s too much smog that day from agricultural emissions in the Central Valley, or even too many locals complain that they don’t like smoke. Reforms after the epic 2017 and 2018 fire seasons led to some loosening of the CARB/prescribed fire rules, but we still have a long way to go.

“One thing to keep in mind is that air-quality impacts from prescribed burning are minuscule compared to what you’re experiencing right now,” said Matthew Hurteau, associate professor of biology at University of New Mexico and director of the Earth Systems Ecology Lab, which looks at how climate change will impact forest systems. With prescribed burns, people can plan ahead: get out of town, install a HEPA filter in their house, make a rational plan to live with smoke. Historical accounts of California summers describe months of smoky skies, but as a feature of the landscape, not a bug. Beasley and others argue we need to rethink our ideas of what a healthy California looks like. “We’re used to seeing a thick wall of even-aged trees,” he told me, “and those forests are just as much a relic of fire exclusion as our clear skies.”

[Mister Mets]

Your link isn't working here.

Weird.

It was a local news item on how he claimed he thought he hit a deer Saturday Night, prior to the discovery of a body on Sunday morning, which is a strange detail.

CBS covered it, too.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/south-d...an-joe-boever/

Incidentally, the phrase "discovery of a body" is probably one of the least favorite ones for a politician's press secretary and campaign staff to hear associated with their boss.

One weird detail is that the AG says he discovered the body when returning to the scene the next day.

https://www.startribune.com/south-da...ash/572407042/

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg said in a statement late Monday that he realized he had struck and killed a man walking along a rural stretch of highway only after returning to the scene the next day and discovering the body.

The state's top law enforcement officer said he initially thought he hit a deer while driving home from a Republican fundraiser on Saturday night. He is under investigation by the South Dakota Highway Patrol.

Ravnsborg said he immediately called 911 after the crash on U.S. Highway 14 and that he didn't realize he had hit a man until he returned to the scene the next morning and found him while looking for the animal he thought he had hit.

Authorities identified the dead man as 55-year-old Joseph Boever, who had crashed his truck in that area earlier, according to relatives, and was apparently walking toward it near the road when he was hit.

[worstblogever]

That whole story makes the time Chuck Grassley posted on Twitter about hitting a deer, and ended it by saying he just kept driving and "assume deer dead".

Meanwhile, there's an unsolved hit and run in Iowa.

[Tami]

Pro-Trump youth group enlists teens in secretive campaign likened to a ‘troll farm,’ prompting rebuke by Facebook and Twitter

One tweet claimed coronavirus numbers were intentionally inflated, adding, “It’s hard to know what to believe.” Another warned, “Don’t trust Dr. Fauci.”

A Facebook comment argued that mail-in ballots “will lead to fraud for this election,” while an Instagram comment amplified the erroneous claim that 28 million ballots went missing in the past four elections.

The messages have been emanating in recent months from the accounts of young people in Arizona seemingly expressing their own views — standing up for President Trump in a battleground state and echoing talking points from his reelection campaign.

Far from representing a genuine social media groundswell, however, the posts are the product of a sprawling yet secretive campaign that experts say evades the guardrails put in place by social media companies to limit online disinformation of the sort used by Russia during the 2016 campaign.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Judging from what I've heard and read about last night town hall fiasco (I wasn't about to risk what few brain cells I have left by watching it myself), Trump proved beyond any lasting shadow of doubt that he's woefully and pathetically out of his depth in any public setting where he isn't surrounded by sycophants, Kool-Aid drinkers, yes men, bootlickers and asskissers. Just like it wasn't smart of Trump to sit down for an interview with a reporter who helped bring down Richard Nixon, whoever told Dolt45 that doing a town hall was a good idea will soon have his head on a platter, if it isn't already. You can't tell me Trump wasn't furious after that shitshow ended because he'd been made to look like even more of a clown than he already is now.

[InformationGeek]

Here's Trump campaign ads invoking antisemitic imagery in attacking both Biden and Bernie.

I want to bring that up particular campaign ad again here, because I just saw this news report via The Guardian.

'Nearly two-thirds of US adults unaware 6m Jews killed in the #Holocaust.'

According to survey of adults 18-39, 23% said they believed the Holocaust was a myth, had been exaggerated or they weren’t sure.

This is bad. Really, really bad. I don't know about you guys and ladies, but I first learned about the Holocaust as early as fifth grade. We were eased into it with books like Number the Stars and then The Devil's Arithmetic (that's one that'll scar you as a kid), and even watching movies about it. The fact that we aren't teaching it as much or that people really don't know anything about the details horrifies me. It feels like we are losing in a way. We need to remember this, to have the horrors be taught to others so that no one forgets.


And then there's Donald Trump and his cronies, invoking horrible antisemitic imagery or mocking people who lost family members to the Holocaust. It really drives home how bad things really feel. I don't have the words to properly express how angry or sad I am about this, the current state of everything.

[Steel Inquisitor]

Judging from what I've heard and read about last night town hall fiasco (I wasn't about to risk what few brain cells I have left by watching it myself), Trump proved beyond any lasting shadow of doubt that he's woefully and pathetically out of his depth in any public setting where he isn't surrounded by sycophants, Kool-Aid drinkers, yes men, bootlickers and asskissers. Just like it wasn't smart of Trump to sit down for an interview with a reporter who helped bring down Richard Nixon, whoever told Dolt45 that doing a town hall was a good idea will soon have his head on a platter, if it isn't already. You can't tell me Trump wasn't furious after that shitshow ended because he'd been made to look like even more of a clown than he already is now.

Trump is the sort of politician who fails in interviews with journalists who lob softballs. I'm getting flashbacks of Sarah Palin.

[Gray Lensman]

Trump is the sort of politician who fails in interviews with journalists who lob softballs. I'm getting flashbacks of Sarah Palin.

Palin was better prepared, as scary as that sounds.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

I want to bring that up particular campaign ad again here, because I just saw this news report via The Guardian.




This is bad. Really, really bad. I don't know about you guys and ladies, but I first learned about the Holocaust as early as fifth grade. We were eased into it with books like Number the Stars and then The Devil's Arithmetic (that's one that'll scar you as a kid), and even watching movies about it. The fact that we aren't teaching it as much or that people really don't know anything about the details horrifies me. It feels like we are losing in a way. We need to remember this, to have the horrors be taught to others so that no one forgets.


And then there's Donald Trump and his cronies, invoking horrible antisemitic imagery or mocking people who lost family members to the Holocaust. It really drives home how bad things really feel. I don't have the words to properly express how angry or sad I am about this, the current state of everything.

I don't actively recall being taught about the Holocaust when I was in school, but when I was 15 or so and interested in history, I stumbled upon that early 1970's British made documentary series about World War II, The World At War, and that was how I learned about the horrors visited upon the Jews by Hitler and Nazi Germany. And, let's keep in mind that Trump went out of his way to slurp Netenyahu and Israel, even going so far as to have the US Embassy moved to Jerusalem, now his cronies are pulling this abominable ****? Jewish-Americans should be outraged at what he's done.

[Gray Lensman]

I don't actively recall being taught about the Holocaust when I was in school, but when I was 15 or so and interested in history, I stumbled upon that early 1970's British made documentary series about World War II, The World At War, and that was how I learned about the horrors visited upon the Jews by Hitler and Nazi Germany. And, let's keep in mind that Trump went out of his way to slurp Netenyahu and Israel, even going so far as to have the US Embassy moved to Jerusalem, now his cronies are pulling this abominable ****? Jewish-Americans should be outraged at what he's done.

I've been watching TimeGhost on YouTube, starting with Between Two Wars before I get into the week by week take on WWII. They have taken the time to show the ratcheting oppression against Jewish people in Germany (and briefly mentioned how it was pervasive across Europe at the time as illustrated by the Dryfuss Affair), and how the Nazis were able to seize power in the first place.

It has the same host as The Great War if anyone in interested.

[JCAll]

One of these days I should get a patreon for a lot of reasons...

But I would feel bad using it to pay for just booze. Paying off the mortgage might make more sense.

I've been saying it for years, but I still have no idea how you haven't been snagged for a book deal.
Ben Shapiro has 10 books and he's an idiot. There's just no fairness.